One Planet

Sikina Jinnah and Simon Nicholson, series editors

Peter Dauvergne, AI in the Wild: Sustainability in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

Vincent Ialenti, Deep Time Reckoning: How Future Thinking Can Help Earth Now

Maria Ivanova, The Untold Story of the World’s Leading Environmental Institution: UNEP at Fifty

Peter Friederici, Beyond Climate Breakdown: Envisioning New Stories of Radical Hope

Jennifer Clapp, Titans of Industrial Agriculture: How a Few Giant Corporations Came to Dominate the Farm Sector and Why It Matters

Thomas Princen, Fire and Flood: Extreme Events and Social Change Past, Present, Future

Gustav Peebles and Benjamin Luzzatto, The First and Last Bank: Climate Change, Currency, and a New Carbon Commons

THE FIRST AND LAST BANK

CLIMATE CHANGE, CURRENCY, AND A NEW CARBON COMMONS

A CO-CREATION

WRITTEN BY GUSTAV PEEBLES

WITH DRAWINGS BY BENJAMIN LUZZATTO

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Peebles, Gustav, author.

Title: The first and last bank : climate change, currency, and a new carbon

commons / Gustav Peebles ; with Benjamin Luzzatto.

Description: Cambridge, Massachusetts : The MIT Press, [2025] | Series: One

planet | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2024038606 (print) | LCCN 2024038607 (ebook) |

ISBN 9780262049641 (paperback) | ISBN 9780262382328 (pdf) |

ISBN 9780262382335 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Carbon dioxide mitigation—Economic aspects. | Carbon

offsetting—Economic aspects. | Climatic changes—Economic aspects. |

Money—Environmental aspects. | Value.

Classification: LCC HC79.P55 P443 2025 (print) | LCC HC79.P55 (ebook) |

DDC 363.738/746—dc23/eng/20250213

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2024038606

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ISBN: 978-0-262-04964-1

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d_r0

But true to the circle of time, science and technology are starting to catch up with Native science by … looking to nature for models of design.

—Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants

SERIES FOREWORD

This is at once an odd and exhilarating time to be alive. Our species, Homo sapiens, has had roughly 350,000 years on the planet. For most of that time our ancestors barely registered as a quiet voice in a teeming chorus. No more. Now, a human cacophony threatens the ecological foundations upon which all life rests, even as technological wonders point the way toward accelerating expansion. We find ourselves at a moment of reckoning. The next handful of decades will determine whether humanity has the capacity, will, and wisdom to manufacture forms of collective life compatible with long-term ecological realities, or whether, instead, there is an expiration date on the grand human experiment.

The One Planet book series has been created to showcase insightful, hope-fueled accounts of the planetary condition and the social and political features upon which that condition now depends. Most environmental books are shackled by a pessimistic reading of the present moment or by academic conventions that stifle a writer’s voice. We have asked One Planet authors to produce a different kind of scholarship. This series is designed to give established and emerging authors a chance to put their best, most astute ideas on display. These are works crafted to show a new path through the complex and overwhelming subject matters that characterize life on our New Earth.

The books in this series are not formulaic. Nor are they Pollyannaish. The hope we have asked for from our authors comes not from overly optimistic accounts of ways forward, but rather from hard-headed and clear-eyed accounts of the actions we need to take in the face of sometimes overwhelming odds. One Planet books are unified by deep scholarly engagement brought to life through vivid productions crafted by artists and writers alike, who are freed to express themselves from the heart.

Thanks to our friends at the MIT Press, especially to Beth Clevenger, for guiding the One Planet series into existence, and to the contributing authors for their extraordinary work. The authors, the Press, and we, the series editors, invite engagement. The best books do more than convey interesting ideas: they spark interesting conversations. Please write to us to let us know how you are using One Planet books or to tell us about the kinds of themes you would like to see the series address.

Finally, our thanks to you for picking up and diving into this book. We hope that you find it a useful addition to your own thinking about life on our One Planet.

—Sikina Jinnah and Simon Nicholson

PREFACE

The book before you is a collaboration between two old friends: one of us is an artist whose work has been grappling with climate transitions and carbon sequestration for decades, while the other is an anthropologist whose work, for just as long, has focused on the power and management of currency. While we’ve been friends since childhood, these separate careers never overlapped; we were each on our different paths, happily pursuing our own different passions. Thankfully, serendipity prevailed, and one day we shared the chance collision that made us recognize the possibility that our two passions could be conjoined to create a complex new passion, one that we, at least, thought was worth giving a try.

Like a seed that wanted to sprout, the new idea demanded our attention and care. With that seed, our collaboration grew apace, pushing us to work through problems together, while also fueling each other whenever one of us flagged. While the research, writing, and drawing in the diagrams was developed by one of us and the research and writing in the chapters by another, now, years later, neither of us can say where one of our ideas began or ended, and instead we think of it all as a conjoined effort.

At the same time, that conjoined effort only blossomed because each of us decided long ago to drive toward it with our own disciplinary leanings and expertise, while always working assiduously to bring them together into one harmonic whole. We batted drafts and ideas back and forth, instinctively knowing that any budding divergences would push us further along rather than set us back.

But aside from its creative potential, our disciplinary divide has, we hope, served yet another purpose. New ideas penetrate people’s souls not necessarily because of “indisputable” scientific evidence, but sometimes just because of which side of the bed they woke up on. For the climate battle, we both strongly believe that we need to tell stories in as many modalities as possible. Some people will want to be convinced by theories and data from inside the world of academic research; others will respond to diagrammatic representations that make connections and explicate concepts using images and text.

Because we believe this so firmly, you will find no strict one-to-one correlation in our book between the diagrams and the text; they do not “call out” to one another in precise locations. Instead, we offer two parallel—given our subject matter, we might even say “inosculated”—tracks that, when taken together, will hopefully not only convey a holistic sense of our years-long collaboration, but will also serve to translate the ideas you will find in this book to many different readers in many different ways.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Throughout all our work on this project, trees have been our guiding metaphor. Not least, trees are gorgeous and living incarnations of the mutual creation that can blossom from the hidden work of roots. And just like all books, this one has many such roots that have supported it, so we want to do our best here to illuminate how we could not have produced this work without them.

First, we received the sort of honest critique that authors beg for from a host of people who generously shared their expertise with us without hesitation. Friends and colleagues in a diverse array of fields who have our sincerest thanks include Marc Brilliant, Clay Dumas, Karenna Gore, Oshan Jarrow, Johannes Lehmann, Lars Nesheim, David Olsen, Andy Salkin, Gustavo Pereira Serra, John Roe, Wayne Weismann, Carl Wennerlind, Jerome Whitington, and James Young. Within anthropology and its adjacent fields, we are particularly thankful for the deep engagement and support from Sasha Alexander, Adhip Amin, Sareeta Amrute, Jonathan Bach, Kylie Benton-Connell, Amiel Bize, Xenia Cherkaev, Gabriella Coleman, Alexandra Délano Alonso, Julia Elyachar, Elizabeth Ferry, Rachel Heiman, Holly High, Johan Lindquist, Jeff Maskovsky, Bill Maurer, Sarah Muir, Horacio Ortiz, Claire Potter, Michael Ralph, Josh Reno, Daromir Rudnyckyj, Danilyn Rutherford, Trebor Scholz, Mikaela Sundberg and all my colleagues at the Stockholm Centre for Organizational Research, Renita Thedvall, Miriam Ticktin, Chris Vasantkumar, Antina von Schnitzler, and Mary Watson.

The project has also benefited enormously from the feedback received during public talks at a variety of locations: the American Anthropological Association, the Hau of Finance Meeting, the workshop called “Who Gets the Remainder?” sponsored by the Wenner Gren Foundation, the Settlements and Polities Research Working Group at University of California–Riverside, the Future of Money Research Group; the Department of Anthropology at Stockholm University, the Department of Anthropology at CUNY Graduate Center, the European Association of Social Anthropologists, the Currency & Empire workshop, the Money as a Democratic Medium Conference, and the Department of Anthropology at Oslo University. We also received very close readings from the authors whose work is collected in the recent book As If Already Free, as well as from the many email exchanges that resulted from our 2019 publication in the online journal Public Seminar.

We also relied heavily on the thorough critiques from five anonymous peer reviewers, whose input dramatically shaped the final draft of our work. Also, the diagrams would not be the same without the contributions of Kristian Bjornard, Eric Forman, Dione Lee, Kazi Rayhan, Evan Roche, Fiona Sargeant, and Vinutha Vasanthi Venkatesh. Along the way, we received great advice and guidance from other people in publishing, including Mark Martin, Priya Nelson, and Johnny Temple. Our copy editor, Will Myers, shared his stunning eye for detail and language, while our indexer, Shelby Brewster, went beyond the call of duty. Within the MIT Press itself, we are extremely grateful for all the aid and care that we received from One Planet series editors Sikina Jinnah and Simon Nicholson. And, of course, we owe a deep debt to our fantastic editor, Beth Clevenger, who put her faith in us and made sure we kept forging ahead, and to her colleagues Deborah Cantor-Adams, Katie Kerr, and Anthony Zannino.

We also have had many old friends and family share this journey with us and shower us with support. We want to take this opportunity to thank Ben and Vanessa Anderson, Serge Avery, Ethan Brown, Alix Burns, Josh Dunn, Eric Forman, Becky Houlding, Clara Jeffery, Alex Levering Kern, Alex Luzzatto, Anne Luzzatto, Marisa Luzzatto, Marianne McCune, Clay Moulton, Paul Neaville, Agnes Peebles, Amanda Pollak, Natasha Sinel, Jonathan Stoeckle, and Tom Wentworth. Lastly, we want to thank all of our children, whose steady wisdom and continual critiques kept us going.

PROLOGUE: THE CAVALRY ISN’T COMING

Many of us who are worried about the future of the planet seem to be praying for a deus ex machina to drop from the sky. Ultimately, those prayers betray a belief that either governments or corporations will magically rescue us, letting us off the hook by delivering some technological or regulatory silver bullet.

This book promotes the opposite message: First, heading off the climate catastrophe will require collective labor; no heroes will storm onto the battlefield while we wait, placidly, on the sidelines. Second, and less obviously, we don’t need anything magic to drop from the sky, because the tools, activists, and experts that can heal our planet are all already here; though they have all independently proven their mettle long ago, they now need to be knit together more tightly around a common task.

However, while we emphatically believe that no magic is necessary, we do believe that orienting ourselves around this new common task will require that those of us who live in a “desacralized” nature must re-sacralize it (or, at least parts of it).¹ Unlike magic, the sacred continues to generate the profane world that many of us live in today. Even if the profane world has been colonizing sacred territory for some time now, it still needs the sacred to survive (and vice versa); they are locked together as an indissoluble whole. Indeed, discussing the need for re-sacralization as a tactic for the climate fight need not scare off the heathens among us, for the sacred should always be viewed expansively, far beyond the precincts of organized religion and instead suffused through such things as commitments to family, the rights of the human body, national flags, even—as we will show—the seemingly profane economy.

In other words, the sacred already penetrates and saturates our world. As a premier scholar of religion reminds us, “Something of the religious conception of the world still persists in the behavior of profane man, although he is not always conscious of this immemorial heritage” (Eliade 1959, 50). Like everything else we will propose in this book, such a worldview is not only not new, but it is not even radical. As such, asking ourselves to regenerate a sense of sacredness around a common task is but another already well-honed—and empirically grounded—tool that we can activate in this time of crisis.

After more than a century of recklessly casting carbon out into the skies, now that common task (among many others) is to call all this lost and wandering carbon back home to the solid ground from where it was so ruthlessly seized. If, over generations, we have carelessly dispersed carbon, we must now carefully sequester it. To do so, we propose piggybacking upon the universal (and well-documented) need for all human societies to sequester sacred objects in safe and protected locations. Humanity has developed many tactics for achieving this over eons, sequestering all manner of religious icons, ancestral heirlooms, magical charms, tribal secret lore, and even precious gold (as we will detail). But while this tactic is extensively documented and readily deployable in the climate battle, we can only turn to it if we recognize that atmospheric carbon—so long treated as profane trash by too many—must now be converted into sacred treasure.

Surprisingly, one of the most obvious, quickest, and easiest ways that we can achieve the elevation of carbon to treasure in today’s world is through standard banking practices and the currency that banks issue. Building a “mission-driven” carbon-banking system owned in, and managed by, a “commons” could be the concrete—daily—task that unites all the tools, activists, and experts under one umbrella (see Kaufer and Steponaitis 2021 for a portrait of mission-driven banking; see also Mazzucato 2021, Mazzucato and Penna 2015, and Raworth 2017 for discussions of mission-driven finance). Recognizing that mission-driven banking is more the rule than the exception in the annals of banking, our book turns to history, religious traditions, and monetary policy to detail how such a system could be built, and built quite quickly. Starting in small, localized settings, if it succeeds, it would attract more and more people, bringing in the nonactivists and the nonexperts, who also soon need to play a far bigger role in the global project to redeem all the carbon we have exiled since the first oil was drilled.

Countless successful economies throughout human history (including the global one, if you consider the role of gold or our “faith” in the US dollar) have been organized around something powerfully sacred, precisely because “the sacred reveals absolute reality and at the same time makes orientation possible; hence it founds the world in the sense that it fixes the limits and establishes the order of the world” (Eliade 1959, 30). When faith is allowed to become a variable in how you view and analyze an economy, it becomes apparent that sequestered and eternal sacred objects create the Archimedean point around which the flow of unsequestered and ephemeral profane objects circulate.

But beyond this argument about the potential “metaphysics” of banking, the sacred saturates many thriving and fully functioning economies in other ways too. Consider “tithing,” a nonstate moral “tax” within many religious traditions that has been willingly paid by billions of people throughout history. Tithing is the moment in the economy when the profits generated out of the more “devilish” profane world pay tribute to and nurture the sacred world. This tribute serves as a mutual fiscal acknowledgement of Eliade’s point: profits generated in the profane world nurture the sacred world, while it returns the favor by grounding the reality of their shared world. Even more importantly for our purposes, tithing incarnates what we will discuss throughout as the “treasure–trash continuum”: as we will show repeatedly in this book, treasured sacred objects precipitate out of the robust trade of “trashy” profane objects; priceless and spiritual regalia emerge out of priced and earthly trades. In this vital and paradoxical sense, tithing is one machine for gradually converting profane commodities into decommodified sacred objects, which is precisely what needs to happen to atmospheric carbon (see Maurer 2003 for a related discussion of converting “filth into faith”). To build local carbon banks in the commons, we cannot shy away from these highly functional decommodification machines, even if we wish that they could be exclusively pure and holy right from the start.

By recognizing the potential synergies among everyday banking, mystical religious thought, generations of Indigenous land stewardship, and the latest climate science, we hope to chart a pathway toward healing the planet, by turning carbon waste into carbon wealth. We believe that it is possible to gradually push atmospheric carbon into the realm of sacred, communal wealth, both by tapping into the massive energy and effort that is already afoot and by acknowledging the often forgotten power of the commons. To date, the world has mostly tacked back and forth between hoping that either the market or the state would solve the climate crisis for us; it is now time to seriously consider a third option, offered by studies of the commons.²

Consequently, this book will take you on a winding road, through such things as the history of cowrie-shell currency, age-old fights within economic theory, and even the internal architecture of Wikipedia. We follow this winding road in order to propose a banking and currency system based on solid carbon that would live inside a Carbon Commons, managed by expert stewards, protected by dedicated gatekeepers, and nurtured by devoted commoners.³ The tactics for commons management have been explored by many (not least by Nobel Prize–winning economist Dr. Elinor Ostrom). Through those studies, we have learned that all commons are always in an ongoing dialectic with private ownership, fighting over how best to own and manage our most vital resources.

Tellingly, this never-ending “battle” over economic management often maps onto the territorial battle between the sacred and profane, discussed above. Because it turns out that the easiest (it’s never actually easy!) way to place something inside a protected and well-managed commons is to pronounce it sacred, thereby putting it beyond price. In our era of climate catastrophe, carbon easily leaps to the fore as just such a sacred and vital resource—a life-giving element that we must find new ways to protect.

At the same time, we cannot drop a commons into existence overnight; indeed, the very nature of all commons is that they are always in process, never in stasis, nor complete. They are, as Bollier and Helfrich tell us, “living systems that evolve, adapt over time, and surprise us with their creativity and scope” (2019, 27). As such, they always require diligent and relentless commitment and work, especially to protect them against the many forces that would seek to destroy them. Our book offers ideas for how to build and sustain just such a Carbon Commons via a carbon-backed currency, but our ideas are far from exhaustive, and they are premised on the idea that they can start at a very small scale, even if our blueprint is far from perfect.⁴ If successful, they can then snowball forward and be improved by the dedicated commoners on the ground who are watching over it. As with all commons, a web of users are forced to think about it and assess it every day, as both an act of love and, often, as a remunerated job.

But blueprints are never perfect, and therefore never perfectly followed, so ours should not be expected to be any different (witness the chaotic development of the euro, or for that matter, today’s global banking system). The philosopher Ernst Bloch helpfully identified this standard practice long ago, naming it the “Not Yet.” Pursuing a “concrete utopia,” people must dream a perfect world and then strive toward it, even if they know that it will never be achieved in reality. The daily pursuit of a concrete utopia uses the tools of the present to produce a better world in the future (Bloch 1995).

The proverb is “practice makes perfect” for a reason.

Even with a topic as seemingly humdrum as banking and monetary policy, various factions are now so entrenched that they are no longer really speaking with one another; they only aim to conquer and crush their opponents. Dare we say, they even see their opponents as stupid or, at best, foundationally ignorant. But grappling with the immense complexity of living nature is supremely humbling, much like approaching the sacred, and no one person or discipline has all the answers. Given this, there has to be room for mistakes, misinterpretations, and differences of opinion; the time for seemingly wild and utopian ideas that challenge established theories and well-honed dogma is, officially, upon us. If a famous environmental theorist like Andreas Malm (2021) has darkly proposed that we must begin sabotaging the civic infrastructure that supports fossil fuels, then it feels safe to counter such a bleak option with a more hopeful one.

And yet our idea is so far from utopian in many ways. Because we are proposing an idea based on structures and ideas that have already happened thousands of times in history, we believe that—given sufficient energy by a core group of activists—it could be implemented today, in virtually any country on earth. Should this core group of activists succeed in triggering others to join them, then the regulatory and personal moral transformations that many of us have been calling for could fluidly follow.

Instead, the climate fight has been continually putting the cart before the horse. We must find a pathway forward immediately that does not rely on more years of lobbying intransigent governments, nor on the admirable sacrifice of a small battalion of ascetics. Instead of incessantly begging corrupted governments or profit-driven corporations to finally do something, we believe it is time to forge ahead without them. We must adopt Bloch’s “Not Yet” framework, or we will find ourselves fiddling while Rome burns. The kindling has certainly already been lit.

Given the history that we outline in this book, asking climate activists to reclaim control over currency and banking systems (whose very nature is to sequester precious goods) looms as one highly feasible and impactful tactic for confronting the climate catastrophe. Banks—ordinarily the knee-jerk nemesis of many—are so easily hated because of their easy access to the tools of both power and finance. Even if the traditional left disdains banks and even disdains the money they produce, store, and distribute, there are very few reformers on either end of the political spectrum who imagine a future world without any banks or any money. From this perspective, disdaining banks and money only willingly cedes this vital societal machinery to those who enthusiastically embrace banks and money. We know where they have gotten us.

Pettifor even states, “while it is controversial in some circles to assert this, it is my view that monetary and financial systems are among human society’s greatest cultural and economic achievements” (2017, 5). And thus, given their power and their tactics, she recommends taking far more control over them by placing them more squarely in the public sector. Even if we have a different proposal for who should seize the power of banking and money, we do agree with Pettifor that it is more productive to seize their immense powers rather than continually barking at legislators to regulate them better.⁵

Why does the political left assume that we can, at best, merely “put up” with banking? Why not build mission-driven banks, and a monetary system, that work for us, rather than against us? After all, the wealthiest entities on the planet have already been engaged for decades in so-called “shadow banking,” showing us that it is possible (and for some, obviously, preferable) to walk away from traditional banks. Like all technology, the rich may have just been the early adopters, but now perhaps the time is ripe to build our own variations on shadow banks, dedicated to building up unimaginably immense carbon reserves.

We all know that carbon needs to be rapidly “drawn down,” safely sequestered back in the earth and away from the atmosphere. We know less about how humanity has already achieved this same task once before, but with a different chemical element: gold. Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century banks and central banks unintentionally managed to sequester much of the world’s gold in short order. Simply by deciding that gold should be the foundational commodity that backed the value of their circulating chits, banks the world over successfully tapped into humanity’s cooperative and its competitive spirit. Throughout our book, we suggest that this occurred because gold already resided, in some sense, in the realm of the sacred. And thus, without even intending to, this project in humdrum currency management then galvanized humanity around a central project—a concrete, shared, activity—and delivered an astonishing achievement. This rapid and globally-dispersed sequestration of gold by a worldwide army of currency issuers and users is a remarkable and incontestable historical fact that should not be ignored in the climate battle.⁶

Moreover, building carbon banks that partly take inspiration from the clear lesson of the gold standard may well prove to be one of the more efficient pathways toward changing the minds of the intransigent governments and businesses that have so far failed to protect us. Consequently, we are not proposing a “forever” nor a “perfect” solution, but one that can start today and then be continually and nimbly modified as it moves forward. All the while, it would complement and boost (not replace) the long efforts to change the minds of politicians and CEOs, by instead putting entirely new modes of pressure on these same groups. If, for example, our banks became systemically important, the US Federal Reserve and the US Treasury might be convinced to start sequestering carbon itself, especially considering that it has itself sequestered many a “toxic” asset before. If it did, it would likely do so more efficiently than we ever could, but it will never embark on such a project without having this sort of pressure put upon it by upstart institutions that it hopes to control.⁷

Most enticingly, with a commons-based carbon banking proposal, we need not be held hostage by inscrutable senators from West Virginia, slowed down by newly wealthy consumers in China, or sabotaged by profit-driven oil companies in Holland. With a carbon-backed currency system in place, we can allow anyone who wants to be “left behind” to simply watch as we push forward with the needed transition. They can even scoff at our efforts, but they cannot sink them in legislative sessions or international diplomacy. We can simply build and serve as an example, hoping for new banks and new depositors to spread, just as they did during the nineteenth-century “savings bank revolution” (covered in chapter 4). Along the way, we would blaze new and cheaper pathways to a more just and carbon-neutral future, making it that much easier for the naysayers to jump on board with each passing day. We can happily adopt Bloch’s “Not Yet” philosophy, rather than suffer continuing demoralization at the hands of day-to-day politics and economic rationality.

Currency itself engenders a cacophony of voices and opinions rather than dirigiste dogma, so we hope that people who disagree with the proposal can still appreciate the spirit of intense frustration that pushed us to delve into its possibilities so seriously. Monitoring and managing a currency allows for—indeed, relies on—debate and disagreement. Rather than letting endless climate debates force us into inaction, we can turn to this debate and disagreement as fuel for repairing the planet, just as Wikipedia relies on debate and disagreement to get ever closer to the truth.

Thankfully, the idea of a carbon-backed currency is clearly “in the air.” Ever since we first published on this topic (in September 2019),⁸ we have been discovering other people on the same path, whether that’s the famous fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson (2020) or a host of vibrant and innovative activists. Along with the idea of a carbon-backed currency, countless organizations and individuals are now also working overtime on improving the possibilities to sequester carbon. A carbon-banking system would knit all these efforts together, facilitated by an organized and monitored system that would allow them all to harmonize their energies. With so many people and institutions already fighting to make this idea a reality, the task at hand feels far less … utopian.

NOTES

1. Eisenstein 2021 also offers a vision for a “sacred economy,” though with a very different proposal for how to achieve it.

2. As citations throughout the book will show, we are far from the first to propose the commons as a strong contender for addressing climate change. Still, these models are not well known enough outside of a specialist literature.

3. The terms stewards, gatekeepers, and commoners are taken from Standing 2019 and explored later in this book.

4. Although their approach and policy recommendations differ from ours, authors such as Bollier and Helfrich 2019, Eisenstein 2021, Raworth 2017, and Schneider 2018 have also discussed the possibility of a commons-based currency and “relational finance” that could serve as tools in the climate battle. We also take inspiration from a growing literature on the commons from within the discipline of anthropology (e.g., Coleman 2013; de la Cadena 2019; Hayden 2010; Holston 2019; Maskovsky 2017; Ticktin 2021; Tsing 2015).

5. As this book was going to press, we were helpfully alerted to another newly published book that also insistently places currency into the commons, and sees in it a potential tool for tackling climate change. In Remaking Money for a Sustainable Future: Money Commons, Ester Barinaga Martín (2024) also focuses on the power of the complementary currency movement, but our books diverge in many other ways. We hope that the similarities and differences can help spark debate about how to best harness the power of currency for the climate fight.

6. We cover how this occurred in more detail in chapter 3.

7. Rogoff 2017 makes a similar argument about the reforms pushed through by digital currencies. Central banks were not innovating in the face of rapid change, but once cryptocurrencies arrived, they started to protect their turf by pondering the creation of central bank digital currencies.

8. Gustav Peebles and Ben Luzzatto, “More Precious Than Gold: How a Carbon-Based Cryptocurrency Might Save Our Planet,” Public Seminar, September 19, 2019, https://publicseminar.org/essays/more-precious-than-gold/.

1 WASTE AS WEALTH

The entire cosmos reverberates with the contradictions intrinsic to life.

—Eduardo Kohn, How Forests Think

SACRED HOARDS

If you stop and think about it for a minute, Fort Knox is pretty weird. Somewhere out in the depths of the Kentucky woods lies a legendarily secure vault, costing no small sum of money to build and maintain. In it, the United States has piled high a single element from the periodic table—gold—much of which has simply sat collecting dust since 1941.

What odd instincts would lead Americans to so carefully sequester this object, which has a high value on the market but little utility in the world outside of markets? Considering that this physical gold hasn’t moved in over eighty years, can we even say it has a price on the market, or is it, like England’s Crown Jewels, priceless? The term “Fort Knox” has even entered the American lexicon, to metaphorically describe something that is impenetrable, where extraordinary valuables are kept that cannot be touched by anyone else.

And thus, like many a four-year-old, Fort Knox possessively shouts, “Mine!” to the entire world, in all of its architectural and militaristic glory. But unlike a four-year-old, Fort Knox’s scream of “Mine!” can also be read as a verb in the imperative voice, encapsulating in one simple word the long and dark history of America’s (and many other countries’) mysterious demand that we should dedicate massive capital outlays and destroy lives and the environment in order to delve deep into the earth in pursuit of buried treasure.

Making it even weirder, every year Americans are subjected to heated political debates about which budget items should be slashed. But neither side of America’s political divide has ever mounted a vigorous and public campaign to eliminate the high cost of this “Bullion Depository,” even though—as a seemingly perfect example of a useless and dead hoard—it could easily appear as the very incarnation of wasteful spending. After all, a vast and salacious private market lurks, ready to giddily leap at the opportunity to take this extraordinary cost off the government books.

And famously, we have long been living through the era of “neoliberalism,” which counsels governments to sell off all manner of state assets to the private market. But somehow neoliberals have never cast their hungry gaze upon Fort Knox. To boot, many monetary policy wonks over the past one hundred years have denounced the need for central banks or treasuries to hold gold. For example, Knut Wicksell, a highly respected pioneer of monetary economics, described the gold standard system as “a fairy tale, with its rather senseless and purposeless sending hither and thither of crates of gold, with its digging up of troves of treasure and burying them again in the recesses of the earth” (Wicksell 1936, 193). And then 1971 came along, when President Nixon forever severed the value of the dollar from the value of gold, supposedly ending, once and for all, the backing of national currencies with this arbitrary metal.

Yet here we are, still holding onto our beloved, untouchable Fort Knox and all the precious gold it houses. In fact, the near century-long project to sequester gold in the remote Ohio River plains of Kentucky represents a truly rare instance of American consensus, even at a moment in our history when we notoriously cannot agree on anything. In other words, all this gold is not only safely sequestered against thieves but also against debate. Fort Knox just “is,” placidly looming in the background of the American mind. We consider it an anchor of our identity, never to be dismantled or dispersed, always to be expensively supported.¹

Incontestably, we Americans love to hoard gold, and we’re damn good at it too. No one would dare touch our precious hoard in Fort Knox. Indeed, we moved so much of our gold to a military base in the inland realms of the country because we instinctively believed that others were jealous of our hoard and might seize it as booty in war. So what Fort Knox really announces to the world is that Americans, as a people, have decided that all the gold that it gathered up over the course of its 250-year history is now priceless, never to be sold or seized—only to be safely sequestered.

Imagine, now, if we could organize this same capital, social labor, and collective fixation upon assembling and sequestering a giant carbon reserve, drawing it out of the sky and returning it to earth as part of the effort to combat catastrophic climate change. In this book, we propose a method for doing just that. Starting today, we can build a “banking commons” whose task is to hoard carbon, the same way Fort Knox hoards gold. Such communally owned banks could blaze a path toward healing the planet by spinning carbon waste into carbon wealth. We believe that these banks could gradually push atmospheric carbon into the realm of sacred, communal wealth by tapping into not only the massive energy and effort that is already afoot among climate activists and scientists but also by acknowledging the power of a new, “immobilized,” and sacred Carbon Commons and the vivacious and profane carbon-backed currency system that would issue from it.

To achieve this, we must first turn to anthropologists’ term for this magical journey traversed by the gold in Fort Knox, transforming it from priced to priceless, from commodified to decommodified: “inalienable possessions.” Annette Weiner (1992) coined this term in order to craft a feminist critique of “exchange theory,” which had myopically fixated on all the objects that change hands during a trade—all the objects that move. In contrast, Weiner astutely noticed that during any given trade, there is always something intentionally held back, hidden in the background of the exchange. She wondered if this immobilized object—often considered “useless and dead” by outside observers—might serve as the engine of all the trades that swirled around it, a sort of nucleus that maintains all its electrons in orbit.

Without turning to the language of banking, she describes how the holders of these inalienable possessions then issue (or simply gain) credit from their value. Intriguingly, the holders wield this credit as part of a diplomatic, nonviolent battle to keep the precious inalienable possession in their own hands. Given the immense power that it represents, other people want to acquire some of its magic; if they are not granted fractional representations of it, they might focus on gaining enough brute strength to force it into new hands. These profane chits (or shells, jewels, or what have you) then circulate, always “hailing” and honoring the unmoving and sacred inalienable possession, which supplies a portion of its magical energy that then fuels the chits’ movement. Thomas Weguelin, a nineteenth-century governor of the Bank of England, affirms Weiner’s insight when he explained the purpose of sequestered gold to the British Parliament long ago: “The reserve of bullion in the Bank of England is, in truth, the central reserve or hoard of treasure upon which the whole trade of the country is made to turn” (cited in Marx 1992, 633).

Weguelin and Weiner are both stating that, to keep the objects of trade moving, they need to have a price; whereas the inalienable possession, to stay out of circulation, needs to be priceless. In other words, inalienable possessions are the objects—whether at a national, corporate, family, or individual level is no matter—that we carefully sequester, protecting them from the voracious “pricing mechanism” that would allow them to slip out of our hands. In so doing, we metaphysically transform the object from a profane market good with a price into a sacred one without a price. A family heirloom, a wedding ring, a church’s relic, a business owner’s first dollar earned, the Crown Jewels, all the gold in Fort Knox.²

The sacred is not for sale.

All such objects refuse to move, but only because there is a sacred “spirit” that they represent. Weiner explained that “Inalienable possessions are the representation of how social identities are reconstituted through time” (1992, 11). Such sacred hoards are how we, as societies, fight the entropy of the natural world, seeking to extend our social worlds through time and space. For this reason they hold a fecund, generative value for the community that is always “far greater than … [their] exchange value,” which is just another way of saying “priceless” (Weiner 1992, 36). If that spirit dissipates, the inalienable possession leaps out of its hoard (or is seized by a stronger outside force) and attains a price again.

Consider the wedding ring after the bonds of marriage are dissolved by a divorce, suddenly dancing again upon the free market; or the talismanic green dollar, pasted to the back wall of the bar, converting back into a regular old greenback when bankruptcy shuts down a much beloved establishment. In other words, inalienable possessions and “community bonds” operate hand-in-glove. Take away the inalienable possession, take away the community (or at least a degree of its strength); take away the power of the community, and your special, decommodified, inalienable possession reverts back to a regular old commodity. Weguelin himself was aware of this metaphysical quality of inalienable objects transforming back into alienable ones, since the volatile geopolitical power politics of his day continuously threatened the Bank of England’s precious gold hoard.³

In studying this universal tendency to sequester priceless objects, Weiner’s insights were, in fact, far more broadly applicable than even she had imagined. Hidden in plain sight in the depths of history and hinted at by Weguelin’s statement, we discover that everyday banking also intimately relies on the rhythmic ebb and flow of inalienable possessions. Sound banks must (sometimes by law, depending on the jurisdiction) hold a “reserve” that cannot be traded away, and which allows the bank’s vibrant operations in the world of trade to continue: take away the reserve, take away the bank.

In other words, we contract with banks to responsibly manage and govern an object we all share a deep faith in—gold, silver, the US dollar. And just as we ask that our priests carefully watch over altars and relics instead of doing so ourselves, there is nothing wrong or weird about this division of labor—they sequester sacredness on our behalf, while we continue to live in the profane world every day. As a result, the “credit” that an inalienable possession sets in motion is profane (priced), while the reserve is sacred (unpriced). Like all inalienable possessions, banking reserves are socially reproductive and immobilized while causing robust trade to orbit around them. Given this harmonic overlap, we will consider banking in this religious register, so that we can apply the standard “laws” of sequestration to them.

Beyond this obvious clue about the role of inalienable possessions in banking, the idea that banks have often been deeply intertwined with the sacred is not new. For example, the first banks were often temples, housing and protecting the vital sacred objects of a given society (Graeber 2012; Schoenberger 2012). To this day, some temples in India are the richest institutions in the country (Peralta 2011), Greek temples were also well-known credit-granting institutions (Aperghis 2004, 138; McGlin 2019), and the earliest deposit banks for the working classes in the United Kingdom were “Sunday banks” (as discussed in chapter 4). And let us not forget that Jesus “overturned the tables of the money changers” precisely because they were doing their work inside a religious facility (Matt. 21:12–13). This common dovetailing of the “work of temples” and the “work of banks” is perhaps most transparently announced by architecture all over the world, where many commercial and central banks of the past two hundred years have intentionally sought to mimic the architecture of classic religious temples (e.g., Barbanel 2015). By making such architectural choices, were bankers aiming to remind us that sacred, priceless valuables are safely sequestered in their vaults?

So many of the battles over climate change have been about price rather than pricelessness. Whether we are talking about carbon credits, subsidizing solar panels, or building mass transit, we are constantly confronted with costs, and often high enough costs that some of us deem them unbearable. And so then we fight over costs, over so many line items on a forever-constrained budget. But one of the lessons of human hoarding tactics (exemplified by Fort Knox) is that, when consensus is achieved about any given inalienable possession, we care not a whit about the cost of sequestering it, for we all know, intuitively, that our future depends on it. We gather all our effort and we spare no expense to hoard inalienable possessions, precisely because they incarnate our social reproduction—our ability, as a community, to live another day.

The sacred is not for sale.

And what could incarnate humanity’s ability to live another day more than carbon, the very stuff of life? But carbon is even more powerful (and like many a deity): when mistreated, it is a poison that can kill life.

What if we were to gradually develop a consensus that carbon should ascend to global humanity’s inalienable possession? By following a drawdown technique that is already endorsed in the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, we will argue that we can begin gathering up atmospheric carbon without capital-intensive “direct air capture” machines. Instead, we can turn to the widely accessible, low-tech “pyrolysis” of carbon waste. If we do so, we could—immediately—build collective institutions to return the carbon that we have seized from the earth. Just as priced possessions can metaphysically transform into priceless ones, we could transform profane atmospheric carbon that moves aimlessly through the sky into sacred solid carbon protected in immobilized hoards.

To achieve this, we propose turning to humanity’s well-developed techniques for sequestering priceless objects, especially as they have developed in the banking sphere. Thankfully, history is rife with both “mission-driven” and “cooperative” financial institutions, which have not only been organized around community benefits rather than profit but whose very structure of ownership protects them from strategic capture by corporate banks. Europe even has many cooperative banks functioning today, which share an umbrella organization (the European Association of Co-operative Banks). Financial institutions that are placed within a commons and owned cooperatively can simply choose to not be for sale, much as Wikipedia cannot be bought by anyone (Guinnane 2001; Kaufer and Steponaitis 2021; Nembhard 2014; Schneider 2019). Though it is shocking to imagine in our own day and age, banks need not be dedicated to profit, as long as they are owned by the people and exist in the commons.

Beyond the history of banking, we will also take inspiration from various religious traditions—especially mystical and Indigenous ones—not only because we see surprising harmonic overlaps between banking and religion, but also because carbon is the stuff of life, the root of creation, and thus a fitting subject for religious ideas to help us tackle our conjoined physical and metaphysical crisis. After all, the task before us almost feels more religious than economic, perhaps requiring proselytizing tactics at least as much as incentive-based policies: At a global scale, we must convert atmospheric carbon from something that sullies into something that shines; from something that ruins into something that restores; from something that is wasted into something that is worshipped. Through this process, we will draw atmospheric carbon out of the sky and bury it in the depths of the earth, never to be found again. Beyond that, we must forever protect already existing solid carbon from converting into a deadly, airborne poison. In a word, we must sanctify solid carbon and then sequester it in holy temples, guarded throughout the land.

Not surprisingly, many of the world’s religions consistently confront this alchemical world of paradox and transformation, delineating a world of good and evil and offering guides for navigating it. From them, we often learn that the last shall be first, that the meek shall be powerful, that the dead shall be born again. Religious thought so frequently dwells upon these paradoxes because they course through the natural world: the stunning rebirth of spring follows upon the deathly slumber of winter. Over centuries and across cultures, theologians have always noticed that the natural world is constituted by such paradoxes and the seemingly miraculous transformations that “alchemically” arise from them. As Kimmerer succinctly reminds us, “We don’t have to figure out everything by ourselves: there are intelligences other than our own, teachers all around us” (2013, 58; see also Eliade 1959). Rather than choose to be “bewildered” by them, many religions have chosen to elevate the realm of empirical paradox to the sublime, treating it as an instructive path rather than as frustratingly enigmatic. A healed world beckons, if only we manage to follow that path.

Banks—in theory—could open up this path for us, but only if we see those banks as our own and therefore dedicated to our social reproduction, rather than as external and anonymous institutions dedicated to profit-seeking. As we have noted, banks follow the sacred logic of inalienable possessions. But equally—in offering up such things as “seed” capital and helping people cope with events like bankruptcy, to say nothing of their management of currency—banks serve as collective institutions that guide us through profane versions of the same cycles of birth, death, and rebirth that are the typical preserve of religious institutions in the sacred realm.

Fort Knox, in this sense, is a grand and expensive temple, housing some of America’s most beloved inalienable possessions, powerfully proclaiming to all that American might can serve as the stable fulcrum upon which the economy turns. But just as Martin Luther castigated the Catholic Church for devolving into rank profit-seeking, so too must we now be skeptical of Fort Knox and its clergy in the Federal Reserve, who steadfastly refuse to recognize that a central bank could play a catalytic role in addressing climate change. Fort Knox incarnates the Golden Era, when banking and bankers believed that humanity was somehow separate from nature. Today, we desperately need a banking system for the Carbon Era, when we finally awaken to our intricate and inseparable oneness with nature.

Many a climate activist likely believes that our problems would be solved overnight if we could simply dictate to the entire planet’s population that carbon shall now be sacred and thus never dance upon the market again. But sweeping things into the sacred sphere is never easy, and it cannot be achieved by fiat. For example, the human body was infamously traded all too frequently for millennia, but today such trade is considered abhorrent. But moving the human body from the profane realm into the sacred one (and thereby making it priceless) did not happen overnight. Far from it. And we viciously insult generations of enslaved people and abolitionists if we reduce their transformative efforts and extraordinary risks to the Emancipation Proclamation and to today’s legally enshrined belief that it is “natural and obvious” that bodies should never be sold on the market. Rather, it took immense and tireless work by dedicated bands of enslaved people and abolitionists who risked everything to gradually build an ethical and legal system that insisted that the human body would henceforward be priceless. In other words, noting that we are unlikely to make carbon priceless overnight might offend some highly engaged climate activists, but given the dire straits we are in, it behooves us to pay close attention to the proven tactics available to us, rather than to dream up aspirational ones that are unlikely to be achieved.

THE GOLD STANDARD: A BETA TEST

For all these reasons, this book aims to fully embrace the alchemical power of money (more specifically, currency) and the banking systems that typically organize it. We propose employing a sort of judo-finance, where we build reserves filled with the inalienable possessions that we choose, rather than the Treasury Bills, gold, and the sundry other items that today’s powerful central and private banks have chosen. The barriers to entry to banking have been dramatically lowered by the digital revolution,⁴ thus opening up the possibility to build new banks and new currencies that serve both our and the planet’s needs, rather than continuing with the current system, in which we remain beholden to dated infrastructures built for a more naive era.

Currency systems are a bit like Fort Knox—they just “are,” and we typically only debate their organizational and power structures when crises hit. As a result, we tend not to notice all the work they do every day to bind us together and to help provide direction to our economic system; nor do we look “under the hood” very often to discover how they operate. But as the gold standard era and its Vatican—Fort Knox—proves beyond a shadow of a doubt, currency and banking cannot be ignored as a potential terrain for organizing a global drive to sequester carbon.

Thus, instead of trying to discipline money, we want to let its powerful magic carry us, in an effort to mine and sequester once again. Because if money’s odd magic created Fort Knox, it should be able to build us a new hoard. For, though it caused unappealing and often unforeseen fluctuations in the global economy, the gold standard undeniably achieved something remarkable: From the time it began in the 1840s to 1971 (when that gold was banished entirely from the global monetary system), the gold standard catalyzed a global army of miners, assayers, bankers, and currency users who gradually moved much of the world’s gold from inaccessible, illiquid, natural vaults deep in the earth’s core to highly accessible, liquid, artificial vaults in the financial capitals of the world, with Fort Knox as the apex of its vast and dispersed temple complex.⁵ And all of this was unintended—the policy goal was to guarantee sound money, not to sequester gold at a global scale. As an unplanned tactic for the global sequestration of an element from the periodic table, the gold standard rises unchallenged and nigh perfect.

In other words, if, at the outset, policy makers had announced, “We shall label gold as the reserves of national currencies in order to mine and then sequester the planet’s gold,” then the policy would be deemed a wild success rather than a benighted failure from the dustbins of monetary history. We simply must consider this obvious road map in an effort to trigger the global sequestration of carbon. The gold standard is, in blunt and transparent terms, the successful beta test of a future carbon standard.

As such, the gold standard can offer not only a partial road map, but also a significant amount of hope that we can seize the reins in the climate fight by building our own carbon banks (with associated currencies) and emphatically keeping them inside a commons. (The second half of the roadmap comes from extensive studies and examples of management of the commons.) After all, the banks that were eventually brought under the powerful jurisdiction of places such as the Bank of England initially began as private, highly localized businesses, many of which were supported by philanthropy and volunteer labor. While they were not necessarily “easy” to build, they did sprout up quickly and all over the world, democratizing access to banking along the way, not least as part of a religious drive by reform-minded Christians. At first, some of them were little more than lockboxes and spreadsheets held by local church deacons (and thus, in a sort of a commons), but they gradually got pulled into the orbit of national systems. And this pulling into wider orbits happened almost entirely because of increasing fears about the management of gold and silver hoards and the questions of currency issuance that arose from them (see Peebles 2008).

A CARBON STANDARD

Given this history, combined with the already existing panoply of mission-driven and cooperative financial institutions dappling the planet, we take it as a given that commons-based banks can be built, though of course only with local initiative and energy. We also take it as a given that, after the failure of states and markets to deliver much hope in the climate fight, people around the world are hungry to find new ways to meaningfully join this existential fight, instead of feeling helpless and resigning themselves to the sidelines. As Schneider clarifies, “Co-ops tend to take hold when the order of things is in flux, when people have to figure out how to do what no one will do for them” (2018, 4).

And thus, though the rest of our book lays out the stepwise case for these carbon banks and their currencies, here we want to give a brief sketch of their operation. Though we are relying heavily on a religious idiom, we want readers to immediately grasp that we are proposing something highly concrete and pragmatic. Indeed, we firmly believe that our proposal follows some of the oldest tenets available to us from the history of religions, banking, currency, and commons management. Combined, perhaps it all appears radical, but the building blocks are quite humdrum. As such, we can readily imagine not only the cast of characters who would make these carbon banks real but also the daily operations that would allow them to achieve their tasks.

Foremost among those daily operations would be, of course, the sequestration of carbon. Fascinatingly, our carbon banks would be happily constrained by “Gresham’s Law,” an almost mystical “iron law of sequestration” that, to our knowledge, has not yet been suggested for the study of sequestering carbon. Like a Zen koan, Gresham’s Law laconically states that “bad money drives out good,” offering simple wisdom that has been proven true across history. Discussed throughout our book, Gresham’s Law entails that, in an economy with two currencies that circulate “at par” (that is, they are legally equal in value), the one that is deemed more intrinsically valuable will be “naturally” driven into hoards. For example, if both gold and paper have a steady exchange rate between them, most people will invariably choose to pass the paper off onto the next trading partner while holding onto the gold. Over time, this preference drives gold (the “good money”) off the marketplace: it gradually becomes immobilized and sequestered, while the paper (the “bad money”) circulates. For all intents and purposes, Gresham’s Law is a magical machine that effortlessly sorts treasure from trash, helping a given economic good travel back and forth along the commodified to decommodified spectrum. As such, we should consider it as a central device for spinning carbon trash into carbon treasure.

And empirically, Gresham’s Law is the paramount reason that the gold standard “unintentionally” caused the worldwide sequestration of gold. But there is also a hierarchy to who chooses to sequester; sometimes “the people” also need and want to hold less valuable but more convenient paper, while the bank, as the steward of an inalienable possession, wants to build a hoard. Carbon banks would “naturally” fall into this scenario. Having been entrusted to hoard carbon on the people’s behalf—and jointly owned by them in a Carbon Commons—the everyday users of the banking system would prefer digital chits over messy solid carbon; the bank, on the other hand, would consider the hoarding of carbon to be its paramount task and would thus develop expertise in it.

In standard trades that would mimic the relationship between depositors and banks during the era of the gold standard, the co-owners of our local carbon banks would bring their carbon “waste” to the bank for deposit. Just as assayers in the nineteenth century would measure the incoming gold and its quality, our banks would employ an array of local experts who would know how to source and judge incoming carbon. Upon arrival, they would pyrolyze the carbon waste, meaning that they would reduce it to “biochar.”⁶ Following Gresham’s Law (and the dovetailing interest of both depositors and the bank), this biochar would then be safely sequestered by the banks, while they would issue digital currency credits to the depositor in exchange for it. These credits could then be used by the community of committed commoners who would be supporting the bank. Importantly, so-called biochar is a highly accessible and therefore “democratized” tactic for sequestering carbon, and there is already a growing body of experts and accreditation agencies who are committed to spreading our understanding and reliance upon it (see, e.g., the International Biochar Initiative proposed by Bates and Draper 2019). As our banks grew and matured, they could expand well beyond biochar, but we justify in chapter 5 why we think biochar serves as an excellent starting point for activist banks run according to commons-based management principles.

Such deposits of carbon waste and the corresponding issuance of digital chits upon its value would form the backbone of each local bank. However, deposits only represent one side of a bank’s ledger—the liability side. Banks also have an asset side to their ledgers, comprised not only of working capital and reserves but also investments. We believe our banks should be no different and should therefore become well-known in their local areas for being the best place to turn for ambitious and innovative projects focused on reducing net carbon emissions. As a result, local banks would employ teams of experts who specialized in the overall project to drawdown carbon. Some would, of course, be trained in finance, but the bank would also have much need of ecologists, chemists, and agronomists who could lend a hand in assessing the validity and potential of incoming loan requests and in monitoring them after they have been issued. This sort of work has the knock-on benefit of proselytizing for the climate transition, gradually converting more and more local businesspeople as they become alert to these new zones of available funding, should they simply choose to follow the principles that organize the commons banks.

BANKING IN THE COMMONS

For the uninitiated, we list here Ostrom’s well-known principles for governance of the commons (Ostrom 1990, 90–102). Instead of delving into all of their implications in this introductory chapter, we instead offer the following characteristics of the commons as scaffolding that can then be fleshed out in the rest of the book:

1. Clearly defined boundaries (who belongs and how to join or depart)

2. Congruence between appropriation and provision rules and local conditions (how to distribute the commons’ resources, while also acknowledging that there are no “one-size-fits-all” models)

3. Collective-choice arrangements (how to participate in governance)

4. Monitoring (auditing the system to ensure it is working as planned)

5. Graduated sanctions (tactics for penalizing rule violators)

6. Conflict-resolution mechanisms (tactics for addressing disputes)

7. Minimal recognition of rights to organize (local sovereignty of the commons is not infringed upon by other modes of governance)

8. Nested enterprises (replicating these principles at scale if one commons is in communication with another; only applicable for larger systems)

Schneider (Schneider 2019, 20–21) provides a more recent list of principles taken from the international cooperative movement that modifies and builds upon Ostrom’s work, attesting once again to something she held dear, which is that the commons must be nimble and dynamic and cannot become ossified by adhering to a set of advance directives and rigid prescriptions. As Bollier and Helfrich remind us, “it is … critical for commoners to consciously decide how to craft their governance systems” (2019, 124). In other words, Ostrom’s empirically derived principles are a starting point, not an end-point; as we write, there is much practice-based wisdom vivaciously flowing through the world.

We are so emphatic about proposing a commons-based model not because of our own political proclivities but because we believe it is the obvious, highly pragmatic answer to the extreme loss of faith and cynicism concerning the so-called “carbon credits” market. For a variety of reasons (covered below), this market is now riddled with fraud, leading many to no longer have trust in it. And yet carbon sequestration remains a vital task (among many other vital tasks) for the climate fight, so we must find a way to counter this rife fraud and rebuild a trusted system for sequestering. It seems highly unlikely that the two actors—governments and markets—who caused us to lose faith in sequestration will find a way to restore our faith soon enough, so the commons leaps to the fore as the most viable candidate for doing so.

In other words, we could be proposing a standard private, or even public, banking system in this book, but few depositors would trust that the carbon the bank claimed to be sequestering would actually be in the bank.⁷ Aside from killing the energy for this project before it even gets to the starting gate, if any banks did ever get off the ground, they would surely suffer from the same sort of bank runs that prevailed during the early period of the gold standard, when people wondered if their local bank held the gold that it claimed to hold. With a commons-based bank, the depositors would themselves be involved in bank management and governance, easily gaining access not only to the books but even to the vaults themselves. Trust, the backbone of any financial system, could flourish.

In a commons-based bank, all of these daily projects on both the asset and the liability sides of the ledger come together to create an internal policing mechanism that would serve to keep the bank honest. Depositors could flee if they believe that the bank is not sequestering carbon, just as the bank could go bankrupt if it issues loans to a bunch of fraudulent businesses who fail to deliver on their climate-related goals. But aside from a commons-based banking community having the capacity to see and monitor—and therefore trust—its own sequestration and climate-transition investments, it has at least two additional merits.

Firstly, the vast majority of commons-based systems are inherently localized. They can be “nested” with larger organizations, but their instinctive nature is to be “relational,” among people who are on the ground and working together on local issues. The commons typically gains its power and sustenance from the local project-based collaborations that are needed in order to keep them alive. And we have already learned that “scientists criticize the carbon accounting methodology as a ‘one size fits all’ policy that does not account for the diversity of ecosystems involved and may penalize actions that help restore forest ecosystems rather than destroy them” (Ostrom cited in Wall 2017, 210). Wall goes on to tell us that, consequently, Ostrom “did not believe that there was one single ideal solution that could be used to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and suggested instead that attempts to develop different strategies could promote useful experimentation” (2017, 211–212). In other words, the commons can respond to local conditions in ways that giant banks or giant governments never could.

Secondly, one of the more obvious ways to grow a commons-based carbon banking system is by turning to the pathway already laid down by the “complementary currency” movement (as we discuss in chapter 2). As we explain later, the complementary currency movement has primarily failed to expand and succeed because it has frequently eschewed having a centralized and tangible “sacred hoard.” Instead, it has typically considered the members themselves to be the sacred elements of the community, and this has caused problems for attracting new members. We believe that our commons-based banks, by having a trusted centralized hoard, could succeed where other complementary currency systems have failed. Knowing that they can always remove themselves from a given local bank by exchanging their digital chits for their fair share of the central hoard will allow new depositors to join, without fear of losing all they have accumulated if they suddenly need to move away.

We also believe that, given its necessary commitment to local ecologies, a commons-based banking system would more instinctively follow Raworth’s argument, made throughout her famous book, that economic systems should become regenerative by design. As she tells us, “the growing family of enterprise structures that are intentionally distributive by design—including cooperatives, not-for-profits, community interest companies, and benefit corporations—can be regenerative by design too. By explicitly making a regenerative commitment in their corporate by-laws and enshrining it in their governance, they can safeguard a ‘living purpose’” (2017, 198). Since each local bank will be dedicated not only to sequestration but also to investments in the local community that are directed toward carbon-neutral and carbon-negative projects, “thinking regeneratively” will come naturally to the cooperative owners of each bank. Moreover, the people attracted to join such a collaborative project will likely be aligned with Raworth’s notion of “doughnut economics” and will therefore be excited to think of creative ways to put it into practice.

Because these banks would be held in a commons, these tasks of sequestering and thinking regeneratively far outweigh the foremost task of standard banks, which is to turn a profit. Periodically running a deficit need not be a deathblow for a bank inside a commons, just as the many commons across the world that control, say, fishing rights, might themselves lose money at various points in time, even while their individual members make money by harvesting their fair quota of fish. But this is true not only of many commons but also of banking itself throughout its history: in chapter 4 we explain how the “savings bank revolution” that laid the foundation of today’s global banking system was itself not only mission-driven but also only got off the ground because of extensive philanthropy—donations of both time and money.

These facts clarify the way in which our banks would draw inspiration, once again, from the management of religious spaces. Local shrines are not expected to make a profit, but they are still expected to offer a vibrant meeting space for personal and communal renewal and nurturance. If a given local bank cannot break even in a given year, the finances can be shored up with tithing and other forms of philanthropy, which stands as a highly underappreciated tactic for the climate battle, considering how vital tithing can be for running quite large enterprises such as the Mormon Church. Tithing (and other forms of donations) would never be an option if we were aiming for state- or market-based solutions to carbon sequestration, but since we are proposing grassroots banks in the commons, it is entirely plausible that people would willingly and consistently donate, just as they do to keep Wikipedia and National Public Radio afloat year after year. To further reduce costs, our banks would have a combination of employed workers and dedicated volunteers, all working to further protect their local ecology, just as local religious organizations have a blend of employees and volunteers (we further discuss remunerated versus unremunerated roles in chapter 6). For both paid employees and unpaid volunteers, their daily work—or in a more philosophical vein, their praxis—would create a habitual practice of caring, allowing the environment itself to gradually become their new “ultimate concern,” which theologian Paul Tillich considers to be the sacred object that drives faith (e.g., Tillich 2009).

Sharing strong harmonies with community temples, our banks could even foster a ritual life dedicated to the local environment and always in furtherance of additional sequestration. Bollier and Helfrich inform us that “Commons and Peer Governance must be grown over time and deal with countless uncertainties that cannot be fully predicted in advance. This requires time for a culture of trust and transparency to emerge and yield a network of relationships. Rituals must be invented, and habits must ripen into traditions” (2019, 124). These rituals would themselves aid in the creation of a sense of dedication to the project, just as rituals do the world over. In other words, the daily work of carbon banking would give further fuel to the passion for carbon banking. Following a long line of “praxis theorists” growing out of the Marxist tradition, we recognize the way in which daily activity itself builds not only the social world but also individual consciousness. Having a central goal—carbon sequestration—and a community institution in which to pursue it would have a snowballing effect, building the movement both inside and outside any given local bank.⁸

None of this should be understood as demanding something as extravagant as a new religion, though sometimes speaking of the commons can make its opponents latch onto such a dismissive critique. But atheists can also develop an “ultimate concern” for the environment, even through the humdrum activity of running a bank. While we present this particular tool in the climate fight as one that follows age-old wisdom from both banking and religious life, we do so only because we believe that the institutional forms and practices from both of these spheres of daily life are already well known and “shovel-ready.” With carbon banking, we need not ask anyone to undertake any wild-eyed or fantastical labors. While much climate activism proposes major alterations in daily behavior (e.g., an ascetic commitment to degrowth or a blind belief in geoengineering), a carbon-banking proposal is plausible precisely because it is so utterly standard. Because these pathways have been blazed before for other sacred items in human history (whether gold in banks or relics in temples is no matter), our banks could tap into well-known practices to deliver and develop their services.

As a result, our banks would serendipitously offer spaces for training, remuneration, and networking for young activists itching to work on a paramount issue of their time. Bollier and Helfrich counsel us that “when enough of these pockets of bottom-up energy converge, a new political power manifests” (2019, 3–4). At this stage in the climate battle, we need both the pragmatic capacity of commons to sequester and manage sacred valuables, as well as their ability to galvanize political movements that could then lobby effectively for further change, just as other powerful banks have the ears of many politicians today.

Thus, we believe that yet another merit of a commons-based banking system is that millions of young people are desperate to find ways to feel engaged in the climate fight, but to date there have not been many ways for “regular” people to lend a hand in any collective institutional setting, other than trying to shrink their own carbon footprints or argue with largely intransigent politicians. Carbon banking cannot be a magical panacea, but it can provide a pragmatic space where individuals can, together, become greater than the sum of their parts. By availing ourselves of the infrastructure that already exists to build complementary currencies and sequester biochar, we could build shared institutions where people could develop their “ultimate concern” in the climate, with the belief that they are doing their part rather than feeling alienated or hopeless.

BANKING ON THE COMMONS

One source of that alienation and hopelessness emerges from the failed promise of carbon credits markets. Though they began with much hope, they have suffered a sort of “Wild West” efflorescence since the 2010s, and governments do not seem well poised to rein them in.⁹ Not only would our commons-based banking system be crucially distinct from them, but as stated above, they would serve as a productive response to their failures. Most of these fall under a broad rubric of “voluntary” rather than “compliance” markets, the former being incentive-based and the latter being regulated by governments and applicable to specific economic sectors. For example, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change issues carbon credits that are tradable like currency, while many countries have national (and, in the case of the EU, regional) carbon trading markets in place. Other abstract representations of solid carbon circulate like currency via so-called “Kyoto units” and “Certified Emission Reduction Units.” The International Carbon Action Partnership has also jumped into the fray. And then there is also the proposal known as the Global Carbon Reward, which gained fame in Kim Stanley Robinson’s novel Ministry of the Future.

Many of the voluntary markets, as is well known, have devolved into fraud, and they are therefore a major disappointment for the many grassroots activists who originally pushed for them.¹⁰ Because we are proposing local banks, owned inside a local commons, we believe that we can guard against the pitfalls from which these voluntary markets suffer. For example, with today’s voluntary carbon credits market, someone in Seattle can purchase “offsets” that supposedly represent trees planted in Kenya.¹¹ But because our proposed banks are locally owned and intended to be dedicated to local ecologies, they would never need (nor choose) to engage in the purchase of sequestered carbon thousands of miles away from their headquarters; nor would they ever invest in sequestered carbon that could not be carefully monitored (since their depositors will function as a surveillance mechanism, threatening to “run” on their bank if they suspect fraud, just as nineteenth-century depositors would leave their bank if they suspected there was no gold in the vault).

As for the compliance markets and the Global Carbon Reward plan, our proposal need not threaten them; nor should it be considered redundant with them. At this stage in the climate catastrophe, we need “all hands on deck.” Some people will choose to arduously lobby governments and private corporations to solve this problem (as the compliance markets promise), while many grassroots people, who have given up hope that these players will ever deliver, will instead be attracted to the community-owned banks that we propose. Regardless, it does not hurt either cause if there are activists hailing both from the grassroots and from the government/corporate world; on the contrary, it pushes both efforts forward. For example, if the compliance markets deliver more and more, then all that means is that our banks could consider sequestering the credits emanating from them, placing them in our hoards as viable reserves.

And even though it may be brilliant, we ourselves are skeptical of the Global Carbon Reward’s hope of convincing a consortium of powerful central banks to adopt its plan (this is the idea derived from Chen, van der Beek, and Cloud 2017 and explored in Robinson’s Ministry of the Future). Nevertheless, we are still rooting for them, even while we don’t want to put all our eggs in their basket. Instead, we choose to forge ahead with a grassroots plan that is locally based and grants power back to local communities and their ecologies—a plan that, crucially, needs no legislative changes to get off the ground. Moreover, if we build viable and thriving local banks that successfully sequester carbon, it will certainly aid the Global Carbon Reward’s effort to win arguments with central banks.

Perhaps most significantly, all of the carbon credit schemes—even the admirable ones—are not organized around humankind’s instinctive need to build community-owned inalienable possessions. They are attempting to build robust markets, while we are turning to commons-based banks that will always need to nurture and protect a sacred or quasi-sacred item sitting in a communal hoard. Consequently, the carbon credit market relies on individual choice as the technique for decommodifying carbon. They refer to this as “retiring” the credit, which is to say, it can no longer be traded and becomes priceless and permanently sequestered. The incentive for an individual (or corporation) to do this hinges (mostly) on their desire to gain credit for good behavior, and they can instead choose to keep trading the credit down the line, never truly decommodifying it via sequestration (see, e.g., Regen Network n.d.; Respira 2023). Contrariwise, we are proposing a collective institution whose own raison d’être is to sequester. Local carbon banks will be “machines” for sequestering, and we will not need to rely on individual desires and choices to decommodify carbon.

Considering all this, it should be clear that we are not invested in delegitimizing or eradicating the carbon credits market, even if we see that it has more than a few Achilles heels. It can keep churning onward if it believes that it is on a pathway to success in the critical task of sequestering carbon. Someday, it might even offer types of credits that our banks deem worthwhile to hold, triggered not least by the pressure that our banks would place on them; all the while, the nonfraudulent wing of this market will helpfully cultivate both private and governmental expertise that will be crucial in the overall project to sequester. In pushing for a third avenue of sequestration, via the commons, we are merely interested in offering a philosophical and pragmatic alternative to the individually based orientation of these programs.

In this way, our proposal insistently hinges upon the age-old and well-honed practice of communities’—not individuals’ or corporations’—capacity to convert priced goods into priceless treasures, commodified objects into decommodified objects, profane things into sacred relics. Given the central role that carbon plays in the cycle of life, we think that it is safest to finally treat it like gold, rather than just like a line item on a given business’s accounting sheet. We want to constantly strive toward taking carbon off the market entirely, to close the window of its trading by driving it into sacred communal hoards, never to be touched again. Our banks would serve as midwives for this journey of carbon from priced to priceless. While doing so, they would help to transcend the dangerous divide between the human economy and the natural one.¹²

MYSTICAL CORRESPONDENCES, OR, IS THE EARTH THE FIRST BANK?

Asking that sequestered carbon backstop a new currency’s value is the most obvious critique of our proposal, since people instinctively fear carbon’s abundance. And yet it might not be as challenging as it would seem. Later in the book (especially chapter 8), we extensively cover tactics for addressing the threat that seemingly abundant carbon would make to the carbon banking and currency system (we emphasize “seemingly” because far from all carbon can be converted into sequestrable biochar). But aside from technical questions about the total amount of carbon available for sequestration, monetary policy today—as both the Greek euro crisis and the 2008 financial crisis have clarified—testifies clearly to the fact that central banks already have tools and tactics for coping with the threat of abundance.

For example, during the 2008 financial crisis, both the US Treasury and the US Federal Reserve chose to buy up massive tranches of “toxic” assets (not least, the infamous “collateralized debt obligations” [CDOs]), pulling them off of the balance sheets of the collapsing private-banking system and placing them on the public banking system’s balance sheet instead. And despite many doomsayers’ prophecies, this explosion of the US Federal Reserve’s balance sheet (it quintupled!) did not cause massive hyperinflation (Pasaogullari 2015).

For our purposes, the story is quite telling because the Treasury and Fed took on not only oodles of new reserve assets but also oodles of (at the time) almost worthless reserve assets. And here, we return to the weird and mystical oscillation between waste and wealth. In the 2008 crisis, the Treasury and the Fed manifestly and magically transformed trash into treasure. Which raises an obvious and important question: if the Treasury and the Fed can decide to sequester CDOs in order to avert a financial crisis, surely a central bank can safely decide to sequester carbon in order to avert a climate crisis. Yet most central banks are begging off from this vital task, which provides yet another display of why regular citizens must step into the vacuum that these grand institutions have created.

Aside from these historical instances, we also have examples of important monetary theorists tackling the question of monetary abundance. No less a giant in the field of economic thinking than Benjamin Graham proposed that we build a currency based on a basket of agricultural commodities, precisely because then the monetary system would better mimic the cycle of nature’s abundant bounty; Graham’s ideas are today resurgent, deployed by Isabella Weber during the major “greedflation” debate (Graham 1937; Weber and Qi 2022; Weber and Schulken 2024). Or what of Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, who is on the record saying that “the US government has a technology, called a printing press (or, today, its electronic equivalent), that allows it to produce as many US dollars as it wishes” (Bernanke 2002; see also Pettifor 2017)? In short, today’s monetary system already opens a pathway toward addressing carbon’s abundance, so we should not let dogmatic and knee-jerk pronouncements convince us otherwise (we do, nevertheless, carefully respond to the problem of abundance, in chapter 8 and elsewhere).

Perhaps we hope so sincerely that money should make sense—that it all must be “grounded in reality”—that we have blinded ourselves to its foundationally odd and mystical properties, its own daily engagement in the paradoxical cycle of birth, death, and rebirth. What if, instead of succumbing to our ideological blinders that insist that money must be scarce, we instead considered it as humanity’s attempt (failing, of course) at biomimicry—at tapping the magical and mystical powers that nature so readily displays to us every day? What if the earth itself always was the first bank, and carbon one of its multitudinous currencies? If true, then there is already a “more-than-human” currency functioning in the world around us, “backed” by abundant carbon, from which we can take inspiration.

Asking “how forests think,” Kohn and others have begun probing how to make sense of the infinity of signs that “exist well beyond the human” (2013, 9) and how “nonhuman life-forms also represent the world” (2013, 8). In awakening to these more-than-human signs, Kohn argues that we can transcend the prototypical modernist divide between nature and humanity and can instead “become something new, a new kind of ‘we’ perhaps” (2013, 2). Seeing the earth itself as a banking system that issues and stores carbon (among other things, like water) can, therefore, not only offer lessons for working better with the natural world but also help to clarify dangerous flaws in our own broken systems.

To ponder whether money is actually a form of “sympathetic” magic attempting to mimic nature, we should take a cue from the metaphors that surround us.¹³ Why is it called a bank “branch”? Why do reserves need to be “liquid” and why do bankers like to “hedge” risk? And why do new businesses require “seed capital”? Perhaps, instead of metaphors, these words reflect our fumbling guesses as to how nature actually functions and how we endlessly strive to mimic its innate productivity. Perhaps, instead of metaphors, they are what Walter Benjamin (following the famous mystic Swedenborg) called “correspondences”—microcosmic realities that harmonically clarify macrocosmic relations (Benjamin 2002; Jonsson 1969). And as mystical correspondences, they were seen by the alchemists of old to have the power to magically manipulate the world (these alchemists were the first monetary theorists of the “West”; see Wennerlind 2011). The modern world likes to tell itself that it has completely abandoned such “barbarous” magic in favor of “science.” Scandalous though it might seem, though, currency—crucial to the functioning of today’s modern world—might be distinctly unscientific.

Money’s premier correspondence, of course, is its “flow.”¹⁴ Inevitably following from the gushing movement of currency chits, this correspondence is so powerful that many people forget the dialectical opposite of the items flowing—the immobilized reserves, i.e., the inalienable possession. This dialectic of flow and stasis may be yet another instance of humankind’s fumbling attempt to draw inspiration from the flow, connectivity, and creativity of nature. But unlike our monetary system, nature knows nothing of waste, whereas our currency—our sympathetic magic—always produces dangerous forms of waste and excess, which not only threaten our planet but also contribute to the production of inequality and inefficiency. As we seek to better recognize our oneness with nature, we should then also push ourselves to revalue the waste we have produced, instead finding a way to treat this excess as a sacred, equilibrating, and life-giving elemental force within the system.¹⁵

Consider, in this regard, a tree. But in your mind’s eye, envision the entire tree, rather than merely the aboveground part. Do not the roots appear as almost a mirror image of the branches?

As the mystics who have inspired us would say, “as above, so below.”

But there is more. The forest system makes healthy use of all matter within it, banishing the very concept of waste. Instead, everything—even dead things—is fodder for the next cycle of growth. As for the inalienable possessions, Wohleben even calls a tree a “heavily guarded warehouse … [with] sweet treasures inside” (114) and notes that all trees must “keep hidden reserves of energy on hand” (156). Below the soil, we discover not only a tree’s carbon “reserves” but also its connection with a vast underground network of other roots and “mycelia” that transport these reserves hither and yon, as needed to keep the aboveground “investment” alive. Carbon and water move in and through these vast filaments, exchanging and converting energy while “growing” the natural economy of both plant and wildlife around it. One forest ecologist informs us that these mycelium networks “are mutualistic. They connect the trees with the soil in a market exchange of carbon and nutrients and link the roots of paper birches and Douglas firs in a busy, cooperative Internet” (Simard 2016, 248).

Trees, then, mistakenly appear to us as singular trunks, striving toward the sky and in competition with their neighbors for precious light. In reality, these hierarchical and individualistic competitors are simultaneously communicating with other trees and an infinite multitude of other living things. The seeming hierarchy of the trunks and leaf canopy cannot survive without the democratically inosculated roots below (the “public goods” of the system), just as the inosculated roots below cannot survive without the hierarchy that is at work above (the “private goods” of the system).

Kimmerer sums this up in a more poetic vein when she writes, “I suppose that one of the features of being a member of a nation is shared currency. In Maple Nation, the currency is carbon. It is traded, exchanged, bartered among community members from atmosphere to tree to beetle to woodpecker to fungus to log to firewood to atmosphere and back to tree. No waste, shared wealth, balance, and reciprocity. What better model for a sustainable economy do we need?” (Kimmerer 2013, 171). Currencies organize collectivities, solving collective action problems. While we frequently associate currency with unequal distribution, this needn’t be the case, if their management is handled thoughtfully and by a community that shares the same goals.

From this perspective, we can imagine the possibility that our banking system is but a poor and inefficient mimic—using currency—of what trees already do with carbon.¹⁶ Just as we argued above for banking, in the forest there are communally oriented inalienable possessions that move slowly (some, like the trunk’s base, move barely at all); then there are the more individualized elements (such as leaves and seeds) issued from these inalienable possessions that are sent out to experience movement that is far more risk-filled and rapid. And yet the “natural carbon banking system” of the forest promises an economy without waste. There is seeming excess (e.g., seeds that never take root), but rather than being treated as an “externality,” the natural carbon bank treats this supposed excess as integral and necessary, fueling the next phase of growth.¹⁷ In other words, this natural carbon banking system is already in a Carbon Commons, governed by a more-than-human community with its own inscrutable signs. Both today and in the past, we have been hungrily stealing from this Carbon Commons, just as we have debilitated and destroyed many commons before. By finally reading and tallying its signs, we can transform ourselves from its foes into its latest members.

Our mystics would repeat another one of their aphorisms, “all is connected.”

We are aware of the dangers of embracing these metaphors and mystical “correspondences.” Doing so would lead us to view all of nature a market. As Jason Moore (2015) has so clearly shown, the market capitalism that we live in today produces a certain nature, not least by claiming that it is a free resource upon which we can work (and, tragically, destroy). Instead of this age-old vision of nature and humankind standing opposed to one another, we can instead recognize what Moore calls “humanity-in-nature.” This allows Moore to recast our “work upon” nature as an endless series of inspirations that derive from our intertwinings with it, or as he calls it, our “work through” nature (2015, 1–30). Following Moore, humankind’s many experiments in currency production and management need not attempt to “harness” or “transcend” nature; they could instead be many instances of biomimicry (again, even if failed biomimicry) that reveal our always-entangled relations with nature.

Moore’s insights, then, allow us to flip around the question. Rather than nature being a poor instantiation of a marketplace, what if the human-created marketplace is but an epigone of a more perfect nature, one that exchanges freely and without price? In this model, humankind has been “intuitively” struggling (i.e., without intent) toward a harmonic correspondence between the natural world and our artificial one, to finally transcend the self-imposed and faulty separation that reigns over the two domains. But, like all mystics, we have incessantly failed along the way, and our path has been jagged rather than straight.¹⁸

Not least by misreading the correspondence between this natural carbon banking system and our own, we have allowed our banks to solidify vast inequalities in the world that we do not find in the natural carbon banking system; in a healthy ecosystem, all is typically in balance and no single element gains at the expense of another. In an even more striking deviation from natural carbon banking, our banks are deeply engaged in the production of dangerous waste, facilitating an efflorescence that must be cast out (as “externality”) of the unnatural system it sustains. And rhetorically, today’s banks encourage us to only focus on the hierarchical competition of the marketplace and, to their great advantage, help us forget about the egalitarian cooperation that grounds all of their wealth and success. If we instead learn to read the mystical correspondence of the natural carbon bank that we already live within and through—what we are calling “the first bank”—we can learn to build a last bank that does not put individualized profit and efficiency above communal, life-sustaining balance.

In addition to the illumination it can provide, the mystical language of correspondences also forces us to adopt a sense of humility. Just as the sacred is, by definition, ineffable, so too is it impossible for numbers to ever speak the entire truth of either nature or the economy. In this sense, they too are ineffable; we can turn to numbers to try to improve our understanding of them, but attempts to quantify nature and the economy must always be seen as tentative and insufficient. Given this foundational ineffability, we occasionally turn to religious language to discuss nature and the economy; words such as “correspondence,” “baptism,” “talisman,” and others are deployed here not because we are proselytizing, but because, in their attachment to the more diaphanous world of religion, they point to this inability to reduce the world to numbers. We are contending with boundless and timeless truths, at which we always grasp but never completely reach.

Through such language, we retain a deep respect for this boundlessness, hoping to rejoin it rather than control it. Instead of believing that we have successfully controlled or transcended nature (especially through quantification), we become just one of many members of its “web of life” (Moore 2016). What we perceive as humankind’s willful and goal-directed behavior might be more “instinctive” and less liberated from nature than we believe. This need not be “ordained” or “foretold” in any supernatural sense, but what if seeking out and then sequestering precious inalienable possessions is just “what humans do,” just like we all use language?¹⁹

Or just like an army of ants builds mounds. Indeed, witnessing the era of the gold standard from an epochal remove, we might even imagine ourselves as nothing more than these ants, shifting dirt around as we make our mounds and tunnels.

Consider, in this regard, a bank vault filled with gold bars. These gold bars are the result of human labor,²⁰ which dug deeply into the veins of distant mountains. Along the way, ore was “purified” and transported across vast stretches of the planet—from California to New York, from South Africa and Australia to London. The gold began its life in a hidden and well-protected natural vault called a mountain. At great expense and effort, miners had to “break into” this natural vault in order to remove the gold. But then, in what can only be seen—at this remove—as twisted, bizarre, and certainly unnecessary behavior, humankind simply returned it to a new, artificial vault. It’s all so manifestly stupid and thoughtless that it becomes vaguely tempting to see such action as the product of instinct rather than rational thought.

At a minimum, it encourages us to be deeply humble about our understanding of both nature and our economy. We know that the web of life has little need for gold, but that it thrives on the equilibrating cyclical exchange of carbon. Sometimes this carbon sits in immobilized reserves, and sometimes it bursts out into a world of vivacious exchange. What more can we read from these mystical correspondences that could help us build an economy dedicated to protecting the web of life, instead of destroying it?

TREASURE AND TRASH

The mystic poet William Blake asked us “To see the World in a Grain of Sand / And a Heaven in a Wild Flower” (1968). Despite his counsel, when we probe nature for inspirational correspondences, we also have to look at its darker side. Surely, decaying leaves on the forest floor, rotting carrion on the savanna, or unharvested nuts scattered in the orchard can all teach us something just as valuable as the beautiful wildflower. And so we learn, again almost intuitively, that nature routinely converts trash into treasure—the ultimate treasure: life itself. It takes dead carbon “waste” and magically spins it into life, “out of thin air.” How is this not “magical”?

The alchemists of old, as is well known, fixated on transforming lead into gold, abundant trash into precious treasure; we often view their efforts as exclusively lying within the realm of magic. Intriguingly, Isaac Newton was a celebrated alchemist and Warden of the Mint; that is to say, he was in charge of English currency. Beyond Newton, many alchemists were also some of the world’s first formal economists, involved in thinking about the organization and management of money in society (Newman 2019; Wennerlind 2011).²¹ In short, they, too, were seeking mystical wisdom from nature in order to build a better economy.²²

Upon closer examination, treasure and trash—wealth and waste—have a far more intimate relationship than our day-to-day language suggests. While we immediately sense a gigantic chasm between treasure and trash, human hoarding practices hint that they might actually share deep resonances rather than being polar opposites. Famous economists such as John Maynard Keynes and Knut Wicksell accused banks and central banks of hoarding precious gold, at the same time that famous psychologists such as Sigmund Freud illuminated individual tendencies to hoard useless waste. Freud, in fact, insisted on an intimate relationship between gold (wealth) and feces (waste), between that which is most valued and that which is least valued: “How old this connection between excrement and gold, … according to ancient oriental mythology, [gold] is the excrement of hell” (Freud 2024, 185–186).

In these critiques from economists and psychologists, both banks and individuals are lambasted for behaving irrationally and pathologically (even barbarously, but that is a story we can tell later). Annette Weiner would like to have a word with these great thinkers. If, as she insisted, all societies hoard inalienable possessions, is it at all helpful to call it “irrational” or “pathological”? Instead, we should look for productive and beneficial ways to direct these universal human tendencies. In this regard, we must first notice the weird but instructive truth that humanity, whenever it does hoard, only hoards treasure or trash, and not anything that could be seen as “in between” these two opposing categories.

If one recognizes—as the “mystical economist” Georges Bataille did long ago—that hoards are constituted of items that are not needed today, then treasure and trash can be brought into harmonic overlap and placed in the same category within a “treasure–trash continuum.” Because they are both forms of excess, treasure and trash have no “use-value” right now—they can both be “thrown away” or “disregarded” by rational people while hoarded by (supposedly) irrational people. Either way, they are not necessary for survival today. They are also both abundant, in the specific sense that we can only store it away for tomorrow because we have too much of it for today.²³

Bataille (1949) homed in on this odd harmony between treasure and trash, asking if excess—that which is seemingly thrown away as unnecessary (or at least not utilized)—might actually be the engine of the system. Probing the logic of nature, Bataille followed Blake, asking himself why and when flowers blossomed (in a related vein, he also asked himself why the act of procreation involved ecstasy). Is not the surge of beauteous energy incarnated by the blossom also the sign of its impending doom? Flowering is the last thing the plant does before dying; it is its “death throes.” And thus, from the perspective of an individual flower, Bataille believed that blossoming made no sense. It appeared as wasted energy. If hoarded inwardly instead of bursted outwardly, the flower could live longer. But from the perspective of flowers as a collectivity, the decadent excess of blossoming is absolutely necessary—it gives birth to the next cycle for yet another flower. Seen systemically, then, the seeming waste of the blossom represents individual death while simultaneously representing collective life.

Quite aptly, this is the precise logic that so fascinated Keynes, inspiring his “paradox of thrift” and his concerns with liquidity preferences. That which can appear rational to the individual—to hoard in times of economic insecurity—can cause death to the collectivity. The ongoing life of the system requires that the individual dislodge their excess and not save it for tomorrow. They must burst it forth in exuberant expenditure, to pass it along to others and create new opportunities beyond the self. And well before Keynes, Marx titled the engine of capitalism “surplus-value”—the cast-off remainder of the production process, which he called “dead” and which capitalists unjustly seized in order to create a new cycle of economic growth. In short, whether blossoms or stashes of cash, setting excess in motion is required to create the next cycle of life.

Understanding this unity—rather than opposition—between treasure and trash allows us to insist upon a new value for waste. By spreading manure over their fields, farmers have long grasped that waste sets in motion the cycle of rebirth. Farmers’ recognition of the value of waste is perhaps not so surprising, since they have always been less removed from nature, which, as we argued above, also recognizes the central value of waste.

Indeed, from the perspective of nature, there is no waste. Rather, there is death and abundance, but these are not devalued as “useless” or “abhorrent”; instead, they are the activating agents—the fertilizers and catalyzers—of rebirth. Decaying leaves on the forest floor, rotting carrion on the savanna, unharvested fruits and nuts scattered in the orchard: all are necessary consumption items for some other vital participant in nature’s cycle, part of the treasure–trash continuum. Surplus-value, excess, decadent exuberance, unnecessary expenditure, waste—call it what you will. All of them serve as the fuel to the engine that runs the cycle of birth, death, and rebirth.

Perhaps the unending modern drive to escape death has blinded us from properly reading (as correspondence) the obvious role that waste plays in nature. Many cultures have—again, perhaps in a more mystic vein—come closer to mimicking, rather than attempting to conquer, nature on this vital topic. Dead ancestors are not only consistently “fed,” but they also serve as guides to everyday life and, of course, are often reincarnated in the living. In other words, they are not merely present; they are also active in the life of the community. But if they are not placated and acknowledged, they can cause mischief—harvests can fail and babies can be miscarried. In any event, their role in human life has not been hidden or forgotten. Quite the contrary: it has been celebrated and placed at the center of society and its ongoing success. What has been glossed as “modern society,” though, has consistently feared death, at best, and sought to conquer it, at worst. In short, we try earnestly and vigorously to push it out of the system and to devalue its role. We aim, in the language of economics, to treat death as an externality.

This same odd banishment of death might explain the blinders with which we have long approached carbon waste. Instead of harnessing its power, we have simply attempted to ignore it, wish it away, or pass its dangers on to others (again, an externality). Moreover, we have never even acknowledged that it is part of a cyclic system. Instead, we have “mined” it out of its fossil fuel beds, purified it (e.g., as oil and natural gas), but, unlike gold, never re-stored it in an artificial vault once we were done with it. Using it in this way serves humanity’s (seen individualistically) needs while destroying the collective needs of the planet—the web of life—as a whole. We curtailed the cycle, ending it where it suited us and letting the waste we produced float away into the clouds (literally). We have never figured out a method for valuing this excess—this surplus, this waste. We have only figured out that it is slowly killing us all, rather than setting in motion a new cycle of rebirth.

Significantly, Walter Benjamin (also a mystic, like his friend Georges Bataille) built his entire methodological apparatus around “redeeming” waste. In Benjamin’s thinking, ephemera that had long been dismissed and forgotten by other historians must be “lifted up” in order to understand historical events properly. He found inspiration for this approach from the Jewish mystics he studied, who believed that only the process of “tikkun”²⁴—the gathering up of lost and forgotten “shards”—could redeem humanity. Each redemption of a lost and scattered shard was a mitzvah—a blessing, and therefore a righteous and morally upstanding action. For these Jewish mystics, all of these broken and scattered shards must be brought back together again, to rebuild that which was lost when Eve bit the apple.

And so we introduce another mystical proverb, “the origin is the goal.”

Undeniably, atmospheric carbon is the waste of our era that must now be redeemed. We have been ferociously rampaging through fossil fuel deposits (and other solid carbon reservoirs, such as limestone and soil) since the dawn of the industrial age (see Malm 2016), splitting the unified atom of treasure and trash. Oil is a treasured world commodity, while the atmospheric carbon that comes in the wake of its use—its “fecal” by-product—is dangerous and polluting trash. Considering the apocalyptic prognoses coming from climate change scientists, we are now very much in need of rebuilding that which has been lost, by returning atmospheric carbon back to the cycle of birth, death, and rebirth from which we have removed it. Can we imagine a process of carbonic tikkun, wherein humans—both individually and collectively—seek to perform countless mitzvot, gathering up all the lost and scattered carbon, always striving to return the atmosphere to its origin point at the dawn of the industrial era?

Importantly, mitzvot are different from “sacrifices,” even though both are oriented toward making the world a better place. Currently, the battle against climate change has only asked for sacrifice. Not surprisingly, such calls have often fallen on deaf ears. Sacrifices hurt; they are intended to take away, even if the act is a willing one. If something has not been lost, it is not a sacrifice. Mitzvot, on the other hand, are “good works” that might emanate out of the same spirit as the drive for sacrifice, but they are known to feel good. Everyone loves to do a mitzvah. Moreover, tallying up many mitzvot is itself a blessing and thus personally rewarding, whereas tallying up sacrifices is reserved mostly for ascetics and actively avoided by most others.

What if one could simply and easily tally up one’s carbon sequestrations? What if one could push others to also tally up their own carbon sequestrations, thus allowing people to trade all the mitzvot they have assiduously built up? What if, felicitously, this is one of the things that currency could do? Infamously associated with greed, money is also an important collective and ancient tallying mechanism that allows people to pursue their everyday needs rather than their pathological greed.

Currency issuance stands as one of the most important tools in banks’ tool boxes (historically speaking), and it would be no different for carbon banks. Currency functions as a sort of “vote” in a system organized around market power, which—like it or not—is the system of power operating today, while we face our immediate climate challenge. In fact, currencies have always been goal-directed (e.g., building a national community) and have never been simply “pure” devices for exchange. Currencies’ ability to seamlessly coordinate millions of people’s actions toward one goal is precisely what feels most impossible in the climate battle today, and which we believe can be delivered by commons-based monetary systems.²⁵ If we build our own community currency, we can not only choose how to govern it; we can also direct it toward the goal of fighting climate change.

SUMMARY AND MAP OF THE BOOK

The history of money clearly shows that the vast majority of currencies have always required some grounding value that undergirds them. The paper or digits circulate, but they merely represent (and leverage, as credit) some more foundational value—some inalienable possession—that sits immobilized in a bank vault. As the economy grows, the number of chits rises, as does the size of the immobilized hoard. In chapter 2, “Baptizing Value,” we turn to history to show that virtually anything can serve as the inalienable possession, ranging from tobacco leaves to salt to cowrie shells. In this chapter, we also offer our first discussion of the management of currencies via the commons, by recognizing that currencies often fall into a category known as “common-pool resources” (CPRs). Intriguingly, things inside CPRs typically no longer circulate with a profane price, and instead they are protected as priceless inalienable possessions. Given this, we then argue that the century-long, global movement to build complementary currencies opens the door to intentionally picking solid carbon as our new inalienable possession, which could then happen immediately and without any need for legislative changes.

In chapter 3, “Follow the Yellow Brick Road,” we carefully detail the history of gold’s global sequestration, treating it as a compelling beta test of humanity’s potential to sequester solid carbon. In that chapter, we learn of the incontestable manner in which gold gradually migrated into bigger and bigger hoards, until it finally found itself sealed off from the international market altogether by the world’s most powerful governments and their central banks. As Bytheway and Metzler succinctly assert, “During the First World War, central banks came to control most of the world’s gold, which could not be freely traded and was no longer a commodity in any normal sense” (2016, 6).

By probing the history of gold’s global migrations in chapter 3, we learn that it could not have happened without a banking system. That is, the efficient migration process was led by the banking system’s interest in this particular precious metal, whereas other metals that are not pursued by powerful, networked institutions such as banks do not move in the same predictable, “gravitational” way. For this reason, the role of banks in this process (and the currency they issue) becomes an equally crucial part of the story, which we present in chapter 4, “The Banking Commons.” We witness how, as gold hoards became nationalized, they became nationally held inalienable possessions, and national currencies predictably blossomed with them. During this process, many national currency systems gradually fell into an odd, interstitial space in between government and private ownership. We therefore make the idiosyncratic claim (but supported by insider-experts such as Tucker 2018) that national currency systems are actually already managed by the standard tactics of commons the world over. Given this, it is less of a stretch to imagine that communally owned local banks could sprout up and be governed by the principles of commons governance, just as we propose in this book.

These twinned histories of gold and currencies teach us that a global project to sequester solid carbon would require that we “sky-mine” atmospheric carbon in order to draw it down from its “veins” in the sky. In point of fact, biochar already circulates as a profane good; by banking it, we will gradually convert it into a priceless inalienable possession. Thus, in chapter 5, “The Sky-Miners’ Rebellion,” we propose that our communally owned local banks begin their revolution in sequestration by assaying, and then storing, biochar. Because biochar already has a price on the market, it can readily serve as the “gold” in our proposed system. At the same time, “mining” biochar does not require expensive tools or a vast infrastructure, so the work can start today (indeed, many people already mine and assay biochar). Despite these benefits, this chapter also covers certain downsides to biochar, so we treat it as only a starting point for this project, much like the banks we know and use today got their start by grabbing the gold that was closest and cheapest to hand, before they then went after the more expensive and harder-to-reach gold.

In chapter 6, “Mustering a Platform Army,” we explore in more detail how banks could be in the commons. As holders of our inalienable possessions, banks are in the business of creating and sustaining system-level trust. For this reason, verifying carbon sequestration will be elemental for any carbon bank’s success. By taking inspiration from Wikipedia’s vivacious daily debates aimed at establishing truth, the chapter therefore focuses on the extensive work that will be performed by “verifiers”—the army of people (some remunerated, some dedicated volunteers) who will work tirelessly to ensure depositors that their banks are actually sequestering the inalienable possession that they have placed at the center of their community: solid carbon.

Chapter 7, “Digital Democratization,” provides a discussion of the cryptocurrency revolution. In it, we clarify that cryptocurrencies celebrate their “freedom” from the “intermediating function” of banking, and they excitedly build systems that intentionally eliminate the need for banking. As should be obvious by now, we emphatically reject this aspect of the cryptocurrency revolution. Additionally, our banks will have no need for the energy-intensive verification of “blockchains”; nor are they designed, in any way, with the goal of subverting states. Nevertheless, we do take inspiration from the important way in which the cryptocurrency revolution has opened up both the legal right and the technical ability for communities to choose, on their own, the inalienable possessions that will serve as the grounding valuables of their circulating currency.

Chapter 8, “The Cult of Scarcity,” delves more deeply into the most obvious critique of a carbon-backed currency: the destabilizing danger that carbon is too abundant to serve as the grounding inalienable possession of a new currency. Turning to both economic-policy history (e.g., the European Union’s Common Agricultural Policy) and monetary theory, the chapter details the many ways in which humanity has frequently—and without trouble—addressed the problem of abundance. As either a response to systemic economic threats or a goal-directed plan to hedge risk, humanity sweeps abundance into hoards all the time. And yet somehow we have a distinct inability to imagine what to do with all the excess carbon dangerously floating through our skies.

Finally, our short conclusion, “Homeward Bound,” circles back to our reliance on mystical and Indigenous wisdom, wondering if carbon itself is calling out to us in the only language it knows, begging us to help it on its long journey home.

COSMIC-LEVEL THEFT, LOCAL-LEVEL REDEMPTION

And carbon’s “home” would be—at least in part—the many fossil fuel deposits that we have raided since the nineteenth century. Our insatiable lust for fossil fuels led us to pillage these amazingly well-protected accumulations of carbon, sequestered in hard-to-reach natural vaults, just as we have discussed with gold. If we continue with our idea that there might be something akin to a natural carbon banking system, then our drilling into these natural vaults—at immense cost—resembles something quite as offensive in the public mind as brashly seizing all the gold in Fort Knox. Because humankind had not yet identified such vast pools of accumulated carbon as the precious inalienable possession of a natural carbon banking system that benefits not only humans but all of nature, we blithely allowed such cosmic-level seizure to proceed. Not only allowed, but subsidized. Not only subsidized, but craved. Had a foreign government drilled a tunnel under Fort Knox and snuck away with all its gold, the United States would immediately declare war on it. Moreover, the currency system built upon such reserves would experience a dangerous and destabilizing shock.

And yet this is the cosmic crime we have been committing against nature since oil was first drilled.

As anthropologists have shown over and over again, “crime” is a cultural category. As Marshall Sahlins wrote, “The appropriation of another man’s goods … which is a sin … in the bosom of one’s community, may be not merely condoned but positively rewarded with the admiration of one’s fellows—if it is perpetrated on an outsider” (1972, 199; emphasis ours). We must first see our kinship with someone or something—stop seeing them as “Other”—prior to recognizing that we are committing a crime against them. We could not see that our drilling into nature’s carbon vaults was an epic crime, because we, at least in Euro-American cultures, have infamously proclaimed ourselves as separate from nature (Descola 2013).

To offer restitution for this cosmic crime, and to stop it from continuing, we have proposed a carbon-backed currency, governed and managed in scattered locally owned banking commons that can be built today, without legislative lobbying. By newly holding dear all that we had previously banished as useless (the waste product of the fossil fuels we stole), such communally owned banks would give carbon its proper due in humanity-in-nature’s conjoined cycle of death and rebirth, instead of allowing it to dissipate into the sky. Our literally dead biochar would then behave precisely as a metaphorically “dead” hoard is meant to—as an inalienable possession, sitting immobilized in a safe spot while simultaneously activating growth aboveground. All of this would represent humankind’s attempt to begin a restitution process for the “black gold” it already stole from earth’s own black-gold Fort Knoxes.

All the while, if carbon is one of nature’s currencies, then biochar (and, eventually, other forms of stable and sequestrable carbon) could serve as a correspondence between macro- and microcosmic spheres, speaking the value of nature and allowing it to seep into the human economy; indeed, because of all the carbon-tallying occurring, the participants in this human economy would then better grasp it as a humanity-in-nature economy, one no longer separated from nature and blithely treating it as a free resource. As Kohn explains, “how we represent the world around us is in some way or another constitutive of our being” (2013, 6).

In other words, if the earth itself already treats solid carbon as a core inalienable possession, we must finally “read” this lesson that it teaches (both mystically and scientifically). Throughout humanity’s history, we have pursued countless possible objects as inalienable possessions. Today, we must finally adopt solid carbon as the sacred, life-giving object that it is, harmonizing our own sequestration machines with nature’s. If the earth itself has always been the first bank, it must now also become the last.

The origin is the goal.

A range of other important and thorny questions are always involved in building a functioning currency and its corresponding banking infrastructure. We hope we address many of these questions in the remaining chapters of our book, though we cannot promise to solve them all. In some instances, for example, we take an agnostic view (e.g., should this proposed banking system be organized vertically, with central banks; or horizontally, without them?). With such questions, we propose various possible answers, though we do not claim to have all of the answers. The core of our proposal lies in local communities and local ecologies, so it would never be smart to announce a strict and programmatic vision for precisely how they should manage their cherished Carbon Commons. As Bollier and Helfrich counsel, “Enacting [commons-based] Peer Governance needs to be a living, developmental process in itself. Therefore, instead of offering a full set of prescriptive formulas, our patterns [as outlined in their book] amount to procedural guidelines that enable a stepwise, adaptable path for developing a commons” (2019, 122).

Answers for how to best manage a Carbon Commons will emerge gradually, and they will diverge depending on the needs of those communities and the ecologies they live within and through. The philosopher Joan Macy emphasizes the role that daily concrete practice plays in changing both the mind and surroundings: “Action on behalf of life transforms. Because the relationship between self and the world is reciprocal, it is not a question of first getting enlightened or saved and then acting. As we work to heal the earth, the earth heals us” (cited in Kimmerer 2013, 430).

Practice makes perfect.

NOTES

1. The argument that Fort Knox “just is” seems to be affirmed by the lack of scholarly research on it. O’Malley 2012 and Puleo 2016 offer as much as one can find beyond public websites, with Puleo even suggesting that Fort Knox has remained enshrouded in secrecy, just as one might suspect. He then directs readers to federal government websites for historical information. O’Malley, meanwhile, informs us of how Fort Knox was partly a public-relations operation, trying to convince the world of America’s impregnable hold on the world’s gold.

2. Fascinatingly, and perfectly in line with our arguments, Puleo (2016) informs us that several other sacred valuables that define American national identity were sent to Fort Knox to join the gold there, precisely so that they could be treated as preciously as our gold.

3. The fate of India’s “peacock throne” is equally instructive. Encrusted in priceless jewels, it first moved to a usurping conqueror. But when this second owner was himself conquered, the peacock throne was lost to the ages, presumably dismantled so that individual jewels could slip into pockets, and thereby out of the crumbling palace and onto the marketplace (see Dalrymple and Anand 2024).

4. For example, USAA bank—a very large national bank in the United States—has no retail locations. Not a one. Nor does it have ATMs, and thus it has no need to pay security firms high prices to move cash around in bulk. Much banking can be done remotely nowadays, with no need for “paper pushing” and the miles of file cabinets that used to go with it. For a local carbon bank, building and maintaining a secure carbon vault would be a primary expenditure, along with hiring employees with expertise in the green transition.

5. There are reasonable scholarly debates about precisely when the gold standard began and ended. We cover this era in further detail in chapter 3, but for now, these dates suffice.

6. Biochar is produced when any organic biomass is heated at high temperatures in a low- or no-oxygen environment (so-called “pyrolysis”). Under these conditions, the biomass rids itself of volatile gasses and oils without burning to ash. What is left behind is an emptied-out matrix composed primarily of carbon (see, e.g., Bates and Draper 2019).

7. See Marois 2021 for a public banking proposal.

8. See Nye (forthcoming) for an example of “rituals of measurement” from Ottoman era banking.

9. For careful anthropological study of these carbon markets, and especially their built-in discriminatory flaws, see Gunel 2016, as well as Whitington 2016 and 2020.

10. An article in the New York Times has, in fact, turned to Gresham’s Law to argue that the untrustworthy voluntary credits are pushing the compliance credits off the market (Coy 2023). Insofar as this is a correct analysis, it results from the same argument we are making—that there is no global government to regulate the voluntary markets, so we are better off building an entirely new, locally based regulatory framework to sequester carbon rather than wait for unprecedented international cooperation to save the day.

11. See Whitington 2016 for how this offloads Global North pollution onto the Global South.

12. See Gerber and Gerber 2017 for a plea that the climate fight start paying more attention to decommodification as a tool.

13. Sympathetic magic is a very old term from anthropology; it describes how the magical act gains its power by imitating something else that achieves the desired outcome. For example, Turner (1967) informs us that a tree that exudes a milky sap is turned to as a symbol for female puberty rituals, wherein the neophyte becomes capable of nourishing a baby with milk.

14. Proponents of Modern Monetary Theory dislike the flow metaphor because they believe that it convinces us to think of money as an actual substance, whereas a specific amount of money is but a signal within a broad system and thus money is the system itself, not individual pieces of it. As will become clear from our own arguments, we tend to largely agree with this position, clarifying that money is the systemic relationship between an inalienable possession and the chits that circulate in relation to it. For now, however, it is incontestable that, over centuries, many analysts of money have compared it to the flow of blood and/or water, and thus we can safely say that many important people have regarded it as a fruitful correspondence or metaphor.

15. There is an entire branch of research known as “Discard Studies.” Its literature is already extensive and cannot all be cited here, but they often hold Thompson’s book Rubbish Theory (1979) to be a launching point. More recently, Doherty 2021, Millar 2018, Reno 2016, and Reno 2020 offer fantastic starting points into this growing literature.

16. Brett Scott offers a similar comparison, arguing that state-issued money mimics a tree shedding its acorns (see Scott 2020). At the other end of the spectrum, the Bank of International Settlements (the central bankers’ central bank) also compares the banking system to a tree (2022, 93). So maybe we’re on to something.

17. To be clear, ecologists themselves do not even consider this excess, since it performs a necessary role. We perceive it as excess, but it is perhaps instead a sign of abundance.

18. The standard critique of comparing the market to nature is that it “naturalizes” the market, thereby foreclosing critiques of it because “that’s just how it is since time immemorial.” We are doing the opposite—asking why and how the human market must change so as to better live up to nature’s banking system, which we are failing to mimic.

19. For more discussion of inalienable possessions within the anthropological literature, see, e.g., Godelier 1999, Kockelman 2010, and Peebles 2014.

20. Much of this human labor, as we recount in chapter 3, came from brutally enslaving many millions of Native Americans and Africans. We clarify there, and throughout the book, why building a Carbon Commons will not repeat these horrible predations. In other words, simply because gold was sequestered by relying on enslavement, carbon need not follow that history.

21. Some alchemists were proto-socialists, aiming to destroy the power of money by making it abundant; see Frängsmyr 1980.

22. Paper currency, in particular, was seen as “alchemical” by both its opponents and proponents. It seemed to magically conjure up value from nothing, as the insulting moniker “Satan’s banknote” so clearly attests (see Roberts 2017).

23. A particularly thought-provoking ethnographic instance of the treasure–trash continuum can be found in Ferry 2011, where she traces the mineral trade from production in Mexico to consumption in Arizona. The many “folk history” museums of the world are also very telling in this regard, for they are filled with things like butter churners, which have so clearly been thrown away as useless by the public only to be raised to the sacred by the state. See Pomian 2012 for a discussion of museum collecting and the sacred.

24. See Cohen 2004, 210.

25. Schneider 2019 offers examples of cooperatively governed financial institutions and even hints that they might emanate out of a sense of sacrality.

2 BAPTIZING VALUE

If the world is to be lived in, it must be founded … The discovery or projection of a fixed point—the center—is equivalent to the creation of the world.

—Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane

LAWLESS MONEY

Along with Knut Wicksell (cited in chapter 1), who lambasted the gold standard as a bewildering and childish waste of time and effort, no less a figure than Keynes also attacked it, famously insulting it as a “barbarous relic” (Keynes 1923). But Wicksell and Keynes both would have been even more dumbfounded if they had focused on the global monetary system organized around cowrie shells, which dominated world trade for centuries before the gold standard. Indeed, cowrie shells as units of value are deeply implicated in the so-called “triangle trade,” which was responsible for seizing millions of humans in West Africa and enslaving them against their will in the Americas.

Briefly investigating cowrie currency incontestably clarifies that currency can be organized around something not only seemingly abundant (cowries grow, literally) but also uncontrolled by a central authority. It turns out that monetary scholars have not entirely neglected the reign of the cowrie. In a nerdy episode during the 1980s and 1990s (see Hogendorn and Johnson 2003; also Green 2019; Gregory 1996), they debated the origins of the so-called “cowrie-shell bubble,” in order to ask how the value of cowrie currency eventually collapsed in a wave of hyperinflation, effectively “demonetizing” it.

Once a vibrantly flowing object, moving in and out of both pockets and hoards across the entire globe, the cowrie suddenly ceased its movements and was allowed to stay put in its underwater home. In the language that we have been pursuing here, the cowrie began its life as excess (i.e., immense deposits of unguarded shells in the ocean, there for the taking), converted itself into “treasure” (i.e., as powerful money in West Africa), and then eventually returned to its previous life as “trash” (even found today in abandoned hoards in West African villages; that is, after it lost its economic value, people buried it again in the hopes that someday their trash would return to its previous status as treasure). The history of the cowrie is also, therefore, a history of sequestration.

Without getting too sidetracked by the obscure history of the cowrie, we simply want to point out that, when the cowrie dominated world trade, there was no central bank that governed this shell currency and its circulation. The “central bank” was, for all intents and purposes, gigantic deposits of cowries that lay off the coast of the Maldives; these deposits served as a “natural” central bank, prior to humankind’s development and fine-tuning of today’s “artificial” ones.

Because of their high demand locally in West Africa, merchants hoping to buy enslaved people would traverse the waters to the Maldives to mine cowries, returning to West Africa with their hulls filled to the brim with this (seemingly arbitrary) natural resource. Once there, they would empty their ship of shells in order to refill it with seized souls, who would then be unloaded in the Americas in exchange for gold, sugar, rum, and all the bounties that the “New World” offered.

At their origin point in the Maldives, no one had to “buy” cowries from anyone else—they simply had to have the capital and the capacity to get there to grab them. Anyone who could get to the Maldives could make money “out of thin air” (in an obvious parallel with today’s bitcoin mining). During this era, the cowrie was clearly a catalyzing currency, instigating and facilitating the movement of immense resources across the entire planet. It is no exaggeration to say that the cowrie helped bring into being an entirely new globalized world (even if we are profoundly disturbed and disgusted that this globalized world relied heavily on the sale of humans and the genocide of Native peoples). And yet despite the high functional power of this currency, there was no one in charge. The cowrie was, perhaps like bitcoin today, a “lawless” currency.

While the centuries-long history of lawless currency might terrify many, for others, it might crack open a door to a new future. At a minimum, knowing that the humble cowrie shell could mobilize the resources of entire continents and help build cities where there had been none before must force us to probe the nature of currency itself (see Maurer 2020 for a compendium of other lesser-known currencies). For many of us, currency is “the water we swim in,” and we therefore ignore its foundational weirdness, just as we ignore its boring and bewildering management.

MONEY AND LANGUAGE

Surely millions—perhaps billions—of pages have been written about money. Important debates over many years and in countless languages have raged about interest rates, private-bank issuance, and payment platforms, to name but a few common topics. Considering its centrality in our lives and the scientific claims of economics, it is, indeed, shocking to learn that so much remains unclear. To take but one example, a current debate pits “orthodox” economists against proponents of the emergent field of “Modern Monetary Theory.” Without taking sides, we are astonished that, unlike advances in the natural sciences over the past two hundred years, these scholars are still debating some of the original concerns that brought the discipline of economics into existence long ago.

This lack of consensus suggests that money is not a simple, concrete object that can be investigated with the standard tools of science. Perhaps it cannot quite be circumscribed by one discipline and then grasped more fully as the years progress, in the same way that, say, the physiology of frogs has been by biologists. Instead, because its very abstractness is one of its central qualities, our reach may always exceed our grasp when it comes to “perfectly” understanding money and its daily operations. Money has, like the God with whom it is so often said to compete, an “ineffable” quality. The fullness of its use and meaning can never be completely described and documented. It spills beyond any bounds within which science tries to fence it.

In this sense, money—as many have said before—is very much like language. And language, ironically, is also infamously ineffable—words can never fully capture the concrete objects they seek to pin down (see Derrida 1998, Wittgenstein 2010). Despite this ineffability, the study of language has made great strides over the past two centuries. For starters, we have the famous structuralist linguist Ferdinand de Saussure’s dictum concerning the “arbitrary nature of the sign” (Saussure 2011, 67–70). That is, the word “dog” is a completely arbitrary vocalization of the abstract concept of “dog,” as proven by the fact that they go by countless other names in countless other languages. But aside from its arbitrariness, the “magic” of language resides in the coupling between signs and objects. We see a concrete instance of a dog in the lived world, and it “attaches” itself in our minds to the abstract word and concept of dog-in-general. If we live in a world where an object disappears over time, the vocalized word will also be incapable of coupling to anything in our minds. Take, for example, the catamount, a big cat that used to range the wilds of America’s Northeast. Now that it’s extinct (by most people’s reckoning, at least), how many people can conjure up a vision of a catamount in their head when they hear the word? Like the beast itself, it is virtually extinct in our minds.

In like fashion, money also “calls out” to be coupled to concrete objects in the lived world. And, as the cowrie shell example attests, it is also legendarily arbitrary. If a given quantity of a given currency cannot “grab hold of” a given commodity, then it is not money in that instance. Consider a South African who attempts to buy something in New York City with rands. For her, a box of cereal clearly couples itself in her mind to a certain reasonable range of rands. But if she tries to hand over these same rands to the cashier, the cashier will reject her attempt to purchase the cereal. Instead, the buyer must go to an exchange bureau to “translate” the rands into dollars and then return to the store.

This example also clearly shows how currency only operates as a social relationship. In this example, paper currency, while “coupling” itself to the box of cereal, is also part of a “chain of promises” (see Ingham 2004). That is, the cashier accepts US dollars because she knows that these currency units are attached to a vast hierarchical chain of verifications and guarantees. Many currencies in world history have chosen to give life to that chain of promises by having a currency reserve at their base—in our language, an inalienable possession, like the gold in Fort Knox. However faith-based and silly this may seem, in pragmatic terms it means that the South African rand can only couple itself in the exchange partners’ minds to a given box of cereal because it has already stably coupled itself to a reserve fund in a central bank in its home country—the rand is the “arbitrary sign,” and the object it calls out to is the currency reserve. To continue with the parallel with language, a currency reserve allows people to look at a piece of paper (or a digital chit) and recognize that, “aha, yes, this represents that system of management of your country’s inalienable possession.”

As most students of currency acknowledge, it is, in this sense, a simple IOU (see Aglietta and Orléan 1998). It is accepted across a range of transactions among completely anonymous and unrelated people because all of these same people trust the same third party—the issuing institution and the inalienable possession it manages. The box of cereal is purchased by letting the inalienable possession continue to be managed by central banks, while people’s claims upon that system can circulate. The South African citizen trusts the South African issuer, but the American cashier only trusts the American issuer. Exchange bureaus are simply institutions who are the trust-assessors (and risk-takers) of multiple issuers, doing the work that the cashier does not have the energy or resources to undertake.

This communal trust in an issuer and its stable management of an inalienable possession is what allows currency to become such a fascinating and powerful tool for catalyzing vast quantities of goal-directed social labor. Because all who use a given currency must all trust the same issuer, they become dedicated, on a day-to-day basis and with or without knowing it, in building up faith in that same issuer (Peebles 2008). Their own wealth, success, and survival are tied to this issuer, as can so clearly be seen, a contrario, in countries with very low trust in issuers and their managerial skills, such as Argentina. After one too many currency collapses, Argentineans now often struggle to place their wealth in another country’s currency, usually the dollar (Muir 2021).

When this trust does coalesce, a fully functioning currency is born. As any economics textbook will tell you, money has three main functions: (1) a medium of exchange; i.e., it is used to make everyday purchases and sales; (2) a store of value; i.e., it is viewed as liquid and can be used to plan for the future; and (3) a unit of account; i.e., its users treat it as a measure of all that they value in the economy. Significantly, most of the world’s currencies do not live up to this prototype, only offering some, but not all, of these functions. For example, Argentineans prefer to store their economic value in a non-Argentinean currency, and they calculate some prices in dollars and some in pesos. For our purposes, a carbon-backed currency issued by a local bank would likely have trouble immediately usurping the “unit-of-account” function of money, since people will still “think” in terms of their dominant domestic currency. We can strive to build a currency that delivers all three functions, but we can simultaneously recognize that building such a currency takes time and that the functions might solidify separately, one by one.

COMMON-POOL RESOURCES AND THE SACRED

Imagine living on the border of Canada and the United States and needing to buy gas. Barring the “price distortions” that come from exchange rate fluctuations or different tax and regulatory policies, if the distance to each gas station is the same, the purchaser will opt to buy in the national currency to which they are already bound. They will only bother to cross the border if the price differential would justify it. Note also how the trajectory of the “chain of promises” is radically different on each side of the border. One cashier accumulates US dollars, which gradually travel centripetally toward Washington, DC; the other cashier accumulates Canadian dollars that gradually travel centripetally toward Ottawa. In each capital, the “ultimate promise” was initiated and is (typically, but not always) redeemed.

As the example of cross-border trade hints at, national currencies have gradually evolved into a (typically unacknowledged) “common-pool resource,” abbreviated as CPR (we make this argument in more detail in chapter 4; this also means that we are expanding the notion of commons to include CPRs that are in our midst that are not exclusively small, face-to-face, local institutions). On each side of the Canada–United States border, we find a virtually identical world of free market goods for sale, but, contrariwise, distinct and monopolistic national currencies with which to buy those goods. Economists and assorted monetary theorists are engaged in a debate over why and how national currencies emerge (e.g., is it because governments demand payment in this specific item, or is it issued to reduce transaction costs for the citizenry and the businesses that serve it?). Regardless of who is correct, the separate currencies circulating in these otherwise almost identical marketplaces suggests that currencies are a special type of good that even famously pro-market governments feel little to no guilt in heavily regulating, or even monopolizing.

Like their better known cousins, “public goods,” CPRs are well known for always living under the threat of the “tragedy of the commons” and the “free rider” problem that it can bring in its train.¹ Consider a privately built and owned sidewalk² in a busy downtown area. Its creator will spend money building it and clearing it when it snows. Suddenly, the business right next door is benefitting from this well-maintained sidewalk, but without needing to pay for it; meanwhile, the original merchant cannot sell tickets for walking on his sidewalk. This then, of course, disincentivizes the construction and management of the sidewalk to begin with, and all are left without a well-managed walkway. Into this void steps a “neighborhood block association,” hoping to solve this problem by placing the sidewalk in the commons and managing it collectively. It provides a sidewalk that is open and free to all, thereby equalizing the terrain for all the merchants on the block.³ When gold (or silver) was not yet managed by national central banks, a similar threat of overuse always loomed (and frequently occurred)—people issuing too many chits upon a given inalienable possession, thereby reducing the value of everyone’s chits.

Perhaps one of the most fascinating things about the management of both CPRs and public goods is that complaints about them typically only emerge during moments of managerial failure or threats from outside forces (see Elyachar 2012; Norton 2008). When stewards and gatekeepers guard the CPR well and distribute its bounty smoothly and fairly, the commoners are wont to let these managers go about their business, especially knowing that they themselves will someday cycle into the role and would prefer to be trusted when they do. The way in which high-quality CPRs are supposed to disappear into the background then becomes their most dangerous weakness. Politically, it is far easier to push for increased resources to improve something that is under-functioning; excellent CPRs are more likely to be defunded when they are doing well, rather than gain additional resources from an invested public or member class. So for example, fisheries are often managed as CPRs, though few people who eat fish have any inkling of this. However, if a favorite fish suddenly disappears because the managers of the fishery have allowed it to become dangerously overfished, then people may start to voice their frustration and even investigate ways in which they (or an overarching government) can become involved to solve the problem.

In an odd twist of logic, then, the more a CPR slips out of the mind because of its excellence, the more it means that people are relying on it—allowing it to actually solidify in their minds. For example, if a currency is reliable and its value is not hyperinflating into thin air, we start to “forget” about it; at the exact same time, its significance in our lives increases. We think of much in the world around us in terms of the value of the currency, allowing us to quickly scan the world of consumption. And in the world of production, we can quickly discern our own “worth” to the job market because we tally up our potential salaries in meaningful currency units.

In other words, as it “disappears” from our brain in one way, we become conscious of it in another way (i.e., “Is it frustrating me? Good lord, it’s a mess. Do I need to become engaged in fixing it?”). Compare an Argentinean’s experience of currency with an American’s: For the former, the unstable currency forces them to constantly think about how to safely store money, and it disables their ability to “think” in terms of the value of that currency; some goods and resources might even be tallied in American dollars rather than in pesos. For an American, the stable currency allows them to stop thinking about how to safely store their money, and it enables their ability to think in terms of the value of that currency; goods and resources can only “make sense” in that unit of value.

Put more dramatically, the stability of the currency for an American opens up more mental space and energy to embrace the world of commercial flux and to take more risks. Meanwhile, the instability of the currency for an Argentinean causes them to fear the world of commercial flux. Argentineans, of course, must also navigate immense daily risk, but it is more foundational—dedicated to the storage of value itself. Once this is recognized, the so-called “free market” appears as an utter myth. The free market depends on countless CPRs and public goods alike—stable, collectively owned, noncompetitive monopolies that ground the play of competition in the market itself. In the language we are developing in this book, certain stabilized inalienable possessions must be nurtured and sustained in order to keep the vivacious market around them functioning smoothly.

From this perspective, cooperation and competition are not mutually exclusive. On the contrary, they rely on each other, much like the roots and leaves of a tree. CPRs (as well as so-called “public goods”) often emanate out of society and are not subject to a great deal of debate. Instead, they are things that most of us agree on, and that we collectively believe should be provisioned by and for all of us. Or, as we said above, we have agreed upon them to such an extent that we don’t even recognize that we have to support them—they just “are”—the obvious and given inalienable possessions that ground a given community. CPRs such as currency systems are the quasi-sacred, unquestioned, immobilized and stable center upon which private trade turns, just as that nineteenth-century Bank of England governor, Mr. Weguelin, insisted in chapter 1.

Since the founding of the discipline of sociology, people such as Émile Durkheim have argued that emanations of society often acquire a degree of sacrality, causing people to come to their defense whenever they feel threatened (e.g., a local baseball team, a national park, a publicly owned hospital). Contrariwise, competitive private goods are emanations of individual nodes within the society, and their nature is to be part of the grand debate that is “the market”; consequently, community members are often much more indifferent to any given individual’s gains and losses. Also in opposition to CPRs, the sign of excellence for private goods is not that they are universally forgotten but that they are universally remembered (e.g., Coca-Cola). They are profane and can be swapped out at a moment’s notice by a fickle public (e.g., for Pepsi), whereas the CPR is sacred and, ideally, unchanging.

Currency thrives in this field of tension, simultaneously sowing the seeds of its own stability via its publicly owned (usually, at least) monopolistic reserve fund while also allowing a vast proliferation of chits to jump to and fro competitively.⁴ This has the magical effect of pushing all holders of currency to be collectively dedicated to protecting and sustaining the currency reserves, whether they know it or not. Here we can take inspiration from Bloch and Parry’s book, Money and the Morality of Exchange (1989), which argued that money operates in two temporal registers—one is organized around short-term individual profit, and the other is organized around long-term community reproduction. Currency issuers provide profane digital chits dedicated to individual short-term daily needs, while they simultaneously sequester a sacred inalienable possession dedicated to the community’s long-term needs.

If this sounds doubtful, simply read newspapers from any country whose currency reserve is flying out the door because of a loss of faith in the currency. In such instances, the right and the left come together to vociferously “defend” the reserve and lament the weak management of it that led to the crisis (see chapter 4). Like any CPR or public good, citizens are quiet about currency management whenever the reserve fund is successfully tended to, revealing their bias in favor of growing and protecting it.

Imagine, now, building currency-system CPRs⁵ managed by local grassroots communities, each dedicated to giving birth to a carbon-negative local economy. If we created a digital currency backed by safely sequestered carbon, users of this currency would be oriented—daily—toward carbon sequestration. Our activities would be harmonically attuned to sequestering carbon, even for those who disagree with taking climate action but find themselves trading in the currency nonetheless. Much like every nation’s communists and anarchists often find themselves using a currency (and related banking infrastructure) with which they disagree, even those people who believe that climate change is a hoax would find themselves aiding in the absolutely critical sequestration of carbon.

In this sense, currency has this magical capacity to “baptize” a specific valuable in society, forcing it to be stored concretely while asking that representations of it circulate abstractly. “Baptize” is a particularly apt verb, because currency not only “names” this valuable, but it—as we have described in chapter 1—can introduce new valuables, sanctifying them in the eyes of the community and making representations of it circulate even if it had previously been regarded as excess or trash. Fascinatingly, once a central bank sanctifies a valuable in this way, it aids in its “rehabilitation” from waste back to wealth, just as the collateralized debt obligations that filled the Treasury and the Fed’s balance sheets were after the 2008 financial crisis. Baptizing, in other words, is not only a simple naming procedure, but it also brings something amorphous or unformed into the community, asking that we all recognize it and even treat it as a sacred “child of the community.”⁶

This conscious baptizing of previously unrecognized valuables opens up new horizons for change as we confront the climate crisis. Kimmerer has written powerfully about Native American traditions that see Mother Earth—and all the forms of life cared for by her—as kin, just as if they were brought into our human family via baptismal rites. She writes, “The land loves us back. She loves us with beans and tomatoes, with roasting ears and blackberries and birdsongs. By a shower of gifts and a heavy rain of lessons … That’s what good mothers do” (122). After offering a list of “loving behaviors” that her garden displays toward her, she states, “If we observed these behaviors between humans, we would say, ‘She loves that person.’ … Knowing that you love the earth changes you, activates you to defend and protect and celebrate. But when you feel that the earth loves you in return, that feeling transforms the relationship from a one-way street into a sacred bond” (123–125). It is this sense of a kinship bond that is typically incarnated in inalienable possessions, baptized by a community as a living force within it—a living force that gives and receives, in order to nurture and sustain.

If we, as collectives, can baptize solid carbon as a sacred and life-giving force within our communities, how would our economy change? If we know that cowrie shells can change the world, perhaps sequestered carbon can too, as long as we, collectively, choose it as a sacred valuable, as gold and cowries were before.⁷ As William Goetzman (2017) points out again and again in his book of the same title, “money changes everything.” We are all too aware of the many critiques of money and its power that have come down to us through the ages. We ourselves have dwelled frequently on how to build societies that are less dependent on money and the organization of social labor that it creates. We are equally aware of the endless tomes of literature written by “monetary cranks” and how quickly their proposals might seem not only muddled but even nutty (see Maurer 2011).

But given the dire nature of our current era—the Anthropocene⁸—we would like to insist on money’s more ancient and mystical underpinnings, rather than how we have experienced it since the far more recent dawn of capitalism. To a significant extent, these critics and cranks are interested in money-in-capitalism rather than money writ large. If it truly can be a powerful object managed by the community via our communal respect for a shared inalienable possession, then perhaps we can move past our ordinary suspicion of money and instead aim to seize some of its magic in order to build a better collective future. It cannot be a silver bullet that fixes everything, but it could be a step in the right direction.

THOSE WHO ARE LOST FIND NEW PATHS⁹

Throughout monetary history and all around us today, there are people and communities who have relied upon—and consciously built—“complementary currencies.” These are typically maligned by the dominant society, if they are even noticed at all. One of us (Peebles) even personally added to these critiques, interrogating some of the misguided principles that drove their creation, in his first book, The Euro and Its Rivals (2011). But since “the cavalry isn’t coming,” we are compelled to look to complementary currencies anew, to see if they can provide any inspiration for the climate struggle. If we have been abandoned or betrayed by international organizations, governments, and businesses, what can we learn from the ongoing commitments of smaller groups of activists who have insistently built their own currencies and, in so doing, attempted to baptize new inalienable possessions?

All the different types of complementary currencies—known as “local currencies,” “community currencies,” or “Local Exchange Trading Systems”—don’t need to wait around for the cavalry; they don’t need to worry about hegemonic central banks or galvanizing the political will of entire nation-states. They simply forge ahead, confident and determined in their mission. Thus, instead of dismissing the power of complementary currencies for their small impact, we can turn to them as a weapon in the climate battle precisely because they can be created immediately, without regulatory or political battles. Their shovel-ready infrastructure and well-honed historical practices are there for the taking by activist communities anywhere on the planet (except for, perhaps, inside the most authoritarian regimes).

And if these new local currencies then prove their mettle in sequestering carbon, then their hyper-local enthusiasm will spread to new communities, just as the local-currency movement has spread in the past in response to other perceived crises (e.g., “globalization”). By embracing the scaffolding already provided by the local-currency movement, we don’t need to convince central banks to vastly alter their reserve portfolios; we can simply work beside them—immediately—and lead by example; if these local currencies succeed and proliferate, then the work they do today could be supplanted—eventually—by central banks tomorrow. We cannot wait for central banks to get the memo about the possibility (and desperate need) to sequester solid carbon. Instead, we should build complementary currencies; if they succeed, they themselves become the memo.

To begin our introduction of complementary currencies, it must first be stated that they are driven by community activism. In the typical case, they emerge in moments of a “money famine” or a perceived exportation of capital from a local community. Famous examples include the Great Depression–era money that circulated in Wörgl, Austria, and the more recent “Ithaca Hours.”¹⁰ In most instances, locals first pinpoint a problem: that capital is infamously flighty and fickle, that it can too easily jump across vast stretches of space, leaving behind the location that may have helped create it. By tagging local capital with a local currency, activists hope to circumscribe the latter’s movement and keep it closer to home. In the terms of economic theory, these local activists are enthusiastically adding a “transaction cost” to the movement of capital.¹¹

In some ways, nineteenth-century America’s vast array of private-bank currencies mimicked this model, wherein the currencies suffered a higher and higher “discount rate” for every mile that they traveled away from their issuing bank. While this was cause for critique for a budding nation trying to knit together its distant reaches, it surely also kept local economies more diversified. Higher discount rates discouraged the emergence, for example, of national bakeries at the expense of local bakeries. In like fashion, advocates for local currencies have argued that companies such as Walmart simply suck local profits out of every town in America and send it centripetally to its Arkansas headquarters. With a local currency, Walmart would have to pay a premium for every unit of local currency that it wanted to exfiltrate to Arkansas.

Regardless of one’s opinions about the merits or pitfalls of such policy outcomes, local currencies emerge when communities come together and simply believe that they have something of value—however ineffable and abstract—in their home towns. They know that they house an inalienable possession in their midst—a treasure, even if the broader global market values it only as trash. They leverage that shared belief into a complementary currency system, which can then baptize that cherished local value. Indeed, many local currencies have been launched on faith alone, with community members building catalogs of goods and services they are willing to trade with one another, listing their prices in the local currency rather than the national one.

This faith has, for decades, catalyzed a global movement in complementary currencies that well predates the cryptocurrency revolution. Inspired by texts such as Interest and Inflation Free Money by Kennedy (1995) and New Money for a New World by Lietaer (2011), local-currency advocates have stubbornly built their activist communities of exchange all over the world (see Maurer 2005). Some of these have had more staying power than others, but all of them prove that communities can awaken to baptize their own circulating value. They elevate a local currency—and organize themselves around it—that will diminish the power of the dominant currency, so that they can mitigate what they perceive as its most deleterious effects.

These currency activists have a long history of engaging in robust debates about interest rates, exchange rates across independent local-currency systems, embargoing goods, and even obscure topics such as “demurrage” (discussed in more detail in chapters 7 and 8). Keynes, for one, was not afraid to engage these ideas, by studying one of the movement’s founders, a so-called “monetary crank” named Silvio Gesell. Waxing enthusiastic, Keynes even tells us that “the future will learn more from the spirit of Gesell than from that of Marx” (Keynes [1936] 1997, 355). If Keynes found pivotal inspiration from one of the currency activists’ founding fathers, we can perhaps revisit their arguments without becoming “cranks” ourselves.

Gesell’s book The Natural Economic Order pondered the injustice that holders of money (in a marketplace) had an unearned advantage over the holders of goods. Gesell claimed that money, unlike all other goods, does not “rot,” so the holder of money can always return the next day, watching her money rise in value (and stay safely in her private hoard), while the grain (for example) she wants to buy naturally decreases in value. In other words, Gesell was frustrated by the power of Gresham’s Law. Unlike Gesell, we are arguing in favor of this age-old law and hope to operationalize its consistent, age-old power for the climate fight. Despite his desire to destroy hoards, we can learn from his anti-hoarding ideas in order to build them.

Gesell’s search for a more egalitarian currency that would finally banish Gresham’s Law has, we believe, stymied the growth and power of the complementary currency movement. More often than not, this movement has followed Gesell in his hatred of hoarding and they have therefore eschewed a central reserve. Instead of a concrete, decommodified item that can be released back into the commodity sphere on an as-needed basis, they have named the abstract community itself as their inalienable possession.

However admirable this tactic might be from an ethical standpoint, it has made it very hard for complementary currencies to expand their reach, since the inalienable possession cannot be sold on a broader market in order to facilitate the movement of people in and out of membership. In this sense, Gesell’s hatred of hoarding is perfectly—and ironically, given the title of his book—modernist in believing that humans are “above and separate from nature” and could therefore build a monetary system of “pure signs” without any physical backing.¹² With the hindsight of both history and the ethnographic record, we can now say that humanity—for whatever “benighted” or “mystical” reason—seems to truly need this oscillation between the sacred and the profane, between the stable and the mobile, between the abstract and the concrete. Over a century of modern philosophizing has even condemned this elevation of concrete objects to the realm of the sacred as “fetishization,” whereas we are counseling an embrace of the fetish’s power. Ours is not to reason why, only to recognize this power in the effort to sequester carbon rapidly and at scale.

Given this discussion, a carbon-backed complementary currency would likely succeed where others have failed. The hoard that Gesell hates so much is, in fact, a communal inalienable possession. But as Weiner was at such pains to emphasize, inalienable possessions are always contested—some people try to grab hold of their power by setting them in motion again, some people attempt to escape their power altogether by embracing new inalienable possessions. And this brings us back to Keynes’s critique of Gesell. Gesell’s insight about how money refused to rot fascinated Keynes (heavily influencing his central ideas concerning the “liquidity preference”), but he believed that it was too naive, due to how it ignored the typical self-interest displayed by most people. Thus, he argued that, if society invented a money that rotted, self-interested individuals would simply find new valuable objects in which to store their economic value, e.g., using the Gesellian currency for day-to-day transactions but keeping a secret, non-regulated, rainy-day fund in diamonds.

Because part of the logic of introducing a carbon-backed complementary currency would be to raise the price of one’s carbon footprint, it also might be deemed to “rot” compared to other more dominant currencies on the market. And thus, people might sometimes choose other inalienable possessions—other communities—rather than ours. That is, even if they are enthusiastic members of a mission-driven carbon bank, they might be induced to “cheat” and sometimes slip out of the complementary currency’s system by using a “cheaper” national currency whenever they wanted to keep on polluting.

We cannot deny that this might occur; however, the entire premise of our proposal is that there are many people who want to stop being offered all these cheap ways to pollute; they want to join a community that cares, that hopes. Not only would they gain sustenance and support from their local-currency community whenever they were wavering on this front, but they would also appreciate the transparency of knowing, quite clearly, the true costs of their own carbon consumption. And if the community is strong enough, they would be more likely to see that added cost as a necessary sacrifice, just as today we know that religious adherents willingly forgo personal wealth when they believe it’s important to support the community (e.g., tithing).

If, after all that, they still choose to cheat, we still confront an obvious moment when “the perfect should not be the enemy of the good.” Plenty of national currencies suffer from people who seek to evade their regulations or don’t trust them as a store of value; they may use the currency for everyday transactions but choose to sock wealth away in another currency (Russian oligarchs come to mind). Such behavior certainly undermines the currency, but the currency still brings enough other benefits that the country deems useful and helpful. In other words, the central banks that issue such currencies don’t just throw up their hands and give up, so a carbon-backed currency should not be expected to fold either. And anyway, any reduction in carbon footprints is a blessing at this stage, and the rest of their daily usage of the complementary currency would not only gradually sequester more and more carbon but also help support (as detailed in chapter 5) the imperative need to transition away altogether from fossil fuels.

To summarize, the benefits of taking the local-currency movement seriously are myriad. First, their long-standing existence means that the scaffolding of an exchange and issuing system is already in place; indeed, there are already apps online that allow local communities to easily build their own complementary currencies.¹³ Second, they can start immediately, with no need to convince millions of people nor thousands of bureaucrats of their just cause; they need only find like-minded climate activists, which is not hard in this day and age. Third, a central benefit of local currencies is that people build up trust in the community of users, which would make the key work of verifying solid carbon deposits much easier. Fourth, the already-existing verification systems that we describe in later chapters could be easily grafted onto the global movement in complementary currencies.

The next step after creating a carbon-backed local currency would be to convert it into a proper carbon banking system, so that it could, for example, legally offer loans. Grafting banking onto the local-currency movement will help them continually expand in popularity while also building the needed resources to professionalize the guarding and management of the sequestered hoard. This step would necessarily move a carbon-backed local currency from a largely “informal” economic space that is ignored by local regulatory authorities and push it, instead, into a formal, regulated space. This will, we admit, require regulatory approvals in each jurisdiction in which they might arise. But we take hope from the fact that the anthropological record shows that informal banking structures emerge in spaces that the state has abandoned (see, e.g., Znoj 1998), and the state has certainly abandoned the climate space. In short, starting a new bank is more onerous than starting a new complementary currency, but it is far from an impossible task, and the time feels ripe. By beginning with the simpler local-currency model, we open the pathway to that additional future task.

Regardless of whether a banking system gets grafted onto a local currency or not, complementary currencies provide the infrastructure for dedicated activists to come together and decide, conjointly, what they value most in their lives and then to monetize it, even if the broader society around them refuses to acknowledge that value. Naysayers of a carbon currency rely primarily on the idea that solid carbon is of so little economic value that it cannot serve as the grounding reserve of a healthily circulating currency (this knee-jerk critique of solid carbon, is, in any event, incorrect—biochar already has a price on the market). But climate activists know that life on earth tomorrow will depend on whether we sequester solid carbon today. With a complementary currency built on a solid carbon reserve, these same activists can live out, in daily practice, their foundational belief that carbon is the stuff of life, but only if it stops being sent up into the skies. Via a complementary currency, people will finally be able to baptize carbon—to name it and transform it from trash into the most sacred valuable in our lives. All “lawless” currencies (see above)—including even gold, but certainly cowries—start small, gradually cajoling more and more people to circle around the same agreed-upon valuable.

And so we return to the magic of money. Over several centuries, many novels, movies, religious movements, and political tracts have been built around the common critique that people throughout the ages have “worshipped gold.” But in an act of political-economic jujitsu, we now want to worship carbon; in elevating it to something sacred, it will become protected and sequestered by its community of adherents. Carbon, like gold or cowries before it, is just a “thing”—maybe even a “rotten, trashy” thing like gold in Freud’s critique (or many people’s gag reflex when they see too much gold-colored furniture in Donald Trump’s apartment); such trashy things only acquire market value because of social convention.

In this sense, a new complementary currency founded upon a solid carbon reserve could become talismanic. The people using it might not even need to worry about whether it could fetch economic value outside of their circle of currency users, just as Catholics don’t worry about whether their rosary beads have market value. Trading it, storing it, and volunteering at the local bank that protects it would all become acts of devotion—simple, everyday rituals directed toward securing a habitable planet. As a climate catastrophe looms, and more and more people awaken to the centrality of carbon to life itself, a carbon talisman should have no trouble gaining new devotees.

NOTES

1. We join many other authors in revealing how the idea of the tragedy of the commons has long been misused and misinterpreted, creating horrible downstream outcomes. As Ostrom so strenuously pointed out, Hardin’s original article on the matter assumed that commons were unmanaged—a simple free-for-all. Hardin himself admitted to this mistake, explaining that the word “unmanaged” should have been added to the title (Hardin 2004).

2. The more typical publicly built and owned sidewalk also suffers from potential overuse, but this issue is often solved by public governance. When it is not, such as in New York City, a complex set of enforceable property responsibilities for adjacent landowners (and often block associations) must step in to fill the void.

3. Unlike CPRs, a sidewalk is a good example of a public good that also needs to be managed by a collectivity. The main difference between CPRs and public goods is that the latter are also non-rivalrous.

4. The ownership status of these chits is more confusing. Central banks and their powers to “demonetize,” along with governmental taxation powers, clarify that ultimately these are owned by the same currency system that owns the inalienable possession; but since they are the primary tallying mechanism of individual wealth, people believe that they own them, whereas they actually own only the purchasing power they provide. See Peebles 2012, as well as chapter 4.

5. How CPRs and public goods originate is actually not a typical area of focus in the literature. Not surprisingly, they often “just are”—already present in the world, such as, e.g., a lake filled with fish—and then simply present themselves as something that needs to be managed, one way or the other. Throughout our book, we provide ideas for how to do so with our proposed carbon banking system.

6. “Baptize” happens to be the English-language word for simultaneously “naming,” “sanctifying,” and “introducing,” so we use it here, but we welcome other non-Christian words that can do the same linguistic work. To our knowledge, all societies have some form of “naming rituals.”

7. Lest people protest that we are here bringing together two domains that are ordinarily thought to be opposed—sacrality and money—it bears repeating that gold plays a central role in much Jewish and Christian iconography, while cowrie shells decorate many a West African religious object.

8. Moore (2016) finds this term misleading and recommends “Capitalocene” instead. With this book, we do not aim to become involved in certain debates, so we have chosen the more common of the two terms.

9. This is a Swedish proverb.

10. We found this information at https://www.complementarycurrency.org/ccDatabase, but it appears that the website has stopped working. Instead, we provide a link from the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine in order to give a sense of how expansive the complementary currency movement is: https://web.archive.org/web/20220328103020/https://www.complementarycurrency.org/ccDatabase. Ithaca Hours have, after a long run, finally ceased operation. For more on local currencies, see, e.g., Dodd 2014; Kanters 2023; Maurer 2005; North 1999; Peebles 2011. But these examples only scratch the surface of the enormous social-scientific literature on local currencies.

11. In some ways, this merely rehashes the old fight between Adam Smith and the Mercantilists he lambasted. Smith was keen to point out how flighty capital was, arguably crafting his magnum opus, The Wealth of Nations, precisely because he wanted people to better understand why capital left its “home market” for greener pastures, even though he believed that “every individual endeavours to employ his capital as near home as he can” (1811, 317).

12. Recall that even the famous “fiat” system that built the US dollar is today backed by US Treasury bills. While not necessarily physical, there is still some other object for which the dollar can be swapped, even if those T-bills do not emanate out of the natural world.

13. See, for example, https://www.cyclos.org, accessed November 7, 2024.

3 FOLLOW THE YELLOW BRICK ROAD

In truth, the gold standard is already a barbarous relic.

—John Maynard Keynes, A Tract on Monetary Reform

BARBARIC ORE, CIVILIZED BARS

The global iconography of gold stands virtually unparalleled. Whether on gilded ceilings of government buildings, the altars of cathedrals, the toilets of billionaires, the rings of lovers, the teeth of mafiosi, gold betokens deep and lasting power. Indeed, given the ubiquity of golden imagery, it’s almost hopeless to pick “the most famous” instance of it. Nevertheless, two prevalent images (at least in the United States), when juxtaposed, succinctly encapsulate the neglected story of gold that needs to be told here.

First, Fort Knox, the military installation in Kentucky that we dwelled on in chapter 1. It holds a special place in the American mind, conjuring up a vision of impenetrable might, where many citizens think America keeps all its purified gold bars (as a matter of fact, only about half). In everyday speech, Fort Knox can be used metaphorically, to describe anything that is seemingly impossible to unlock or steal. But it is also a powerful image because Americans instinctively think of it as “ours.” Unlike a billionaire’s yacht or the Empire State Building, Americans identify the accumulated hoard of gold sitting in Fort Knox as a communally owned hoard, and they would be scandalized by anyone caught trying to appropriate it. The gold that was moved there long ago has barely moved since; Americans deem it completely immobilized and utterly safe … for all eternity.

At the other end of the spectrum, “1849” is an equally powerful image in the US imagination. We even have a famous football team named after the year, the San Francisco 49ers, whose uniforms are bedecked in gold. Aside from being synonymous with the inception of European settler-colonialism in what we currently call “California,”¹ 1849 also denotes both “pluck” and a sort of collective madness. As the iconic instance of a “gold rush,” 1849 suggests both insatiable desire as well as the domination and extraction of nature’s resources.

While Fort Knox projects an image of organization, regimentation, and spotlessness, 1849 conjures up unwashed masses primitively hacking away at rocks, with no hierarchy directing them nor law constraining them. In the typical American mind, the 49ers have wild gleams in their eyes, dreaming of tomorrow’s wealth, while the officials protecting Fort Knox have cold, steely eyes guarding the coffers that hold today’s wealth. As heavily circulated images, the dark tale they tell is nevertheless hiding in plain sight, unnoticed and undiscussed.

When combined, these two images not only visually narrate the history of the gold standard but also represent the mythical transformation of society from barbarity to civilization. Armed and dangerous settler-colonists violently and lawlessly battled both Native peoples and brute rock in order to seize some weird yet revered metal from the mountains. As the exploited and murdered Natives and the pillaged and desecrated mountains offered up their unrequited bounty, the settler-colonists amassed exorbitant wealth, using it to gradually build formal military installations, well-tailored uniforms, university research stations, and many other expensive credentials of “civilization.” The ungoverned violence of gold extraction then “went underground,” by hiding itself behind the well-regulated police forces and awe-inspiring buildings of “civil” governance. Meanwhile, the gold itself underwent a similar transformation, altering its appearance from rough-hewn mongrel admixture to perfectly rectangular purity.

Importantly, settler-colonists felt free to brutally seize all this economic value because they saw both nature and Natives as Other. Had the mountains or the Native populations² been seen as agents with a will of their own, they would likely have been brought into an exchange relationship with the settler-colonists. Since such visions of kinship never formed in the minds of these settler-colonists, the vast wealth could simply be appropriated. Yet another instance of Marx’s famous notion of “primitive accumulation,” this settler-colonial violence viciously expropriated a commons via non-market means (i.e., extralegal violence). And just as Marx would predict, this violence is then buried, allowing the expropriated object to then trade in a seemingly sanitized market, bereft of the historical crimes that brought it there (see also Moore 2016). Never one to pull punches, Marx tells us that “capital comes [to market] dripping from head to toe, from every pore, with blood and dirt” (Marx 1981, 926).

Its amorphous form straightened, its hybrid content banished, its dense political history erased, purified gold could now traipse more readily across the global market. Easy, singular quantity replaced messy, multiple qualities. As with much in history, economists study the former, while scholars from other disciplines study the latter. But while the extraction, seizure, and trade of gold has been covered by countless scholars, we have not yet found any who highlight a glaringly obvious result of all the collective human labor and trauma that brought purified gold to market. No one has been interested in the data we display in the “Savings Bank Revolution” diagram at the beginning of our book, which announces the surprising and ignored fact that gold, throughout the historical epoch covered in this chapter, moves inexorably into bigger and bigger hoards.

There is no law of nature stating that extracted metals must eventually land in big, agglomerated piles. But with the advent of the gold standard, gold magically moved toward power, incarnated in increasingly larger hoards.³ Gold, it would seem, is not only attracted to power but also—almost magnetically—attracted to itself.⁴ That is, like the Big Bang, gold that has been cast out of its original home wanders the globe, seeking out variations of itself, adding accretion upon accretion, gravitating⁵ to its new “home” in our artificial mountains known as banks.

Despite our frequent reliance on the metaphor of magic in this book, none of this movement is magical. But like much that is deemed magical at first blush, gold’s metaphysical mystery simply hasn’t yet been sufficiently probed. In reality, humanity—or at least, portions of humanity—actively built a system that cajoled and coerced gold to become “magnetic.” The hoard at Fort Knox (and others like it) has a history, showing that it begins its life as raindrops (ingots, or even dust) dappled in pockets across the world. These raindrops gradually land in lakes (local banks); these lakes then issue forth rivers (the credit market), sending gold toward vast oceans (central banks).⁶ But unlike the hydrological cycle, once it lands in the central bank, it (largely) ceases its movement.

Thus, the question arises, if gold is expected to move out of mountains and through private banks, why does it achieve a placid and immobile state of rest upon arrival in a public hoard? Why is it “obvious” that it should move out of mountains and out of private hands, but once it’s in public hands, it becomes “scandalous” and “taboo” to imagine it ever moving again? What technical mechanisms have been built to enforce this odd ideology that makes gold, over epochs, the sun in a gravitational banking “solar system”? If we can get closer to the root of this strange phenomenon, we should be able to operationalize the same ideology and regulatory system to sequester carbon. Recounting the history of the building of giant national gold hoards will hammer home the possibility that the gold standard can provide an imperfect, but inspirational, road map to a carbon standard, thereby making solid carbon as sacred, and as safely sequestered, as gold.

INALIENABLE POSSESSIONS, REVISITED

Rather than rewrite what has already been masterfully covered by others, we will gloss over an immense amount of detail that would likely only interest the specialist reader. Instead, we will rely on these experts so that we can then highlight the “mystical” aspects of gold’s movements. For, viewed across centuries and continents, it is simply undeniable that gold has long epochs of centripetal movement, matched by shorter bursts of centrifugal ones. Seen in its entirety, gold appears to follow the same laws that govern the planets—gravity pulls it together into clumps, but then cataclysmic events cause it to break apart and circulate again.⁷

Therefore, to watch the history of gold—as substance—is to watch the birth and death of mini, human-created solar systems on fast-forward. In our own era, all the gold bars are sequestered, and no one circulates gold coins anymore. This has been true for long enough that it is easy to imagine that gold has a “natural” tendency to come to rest, to stop frenetically jumping in and out of pockets. But this is the same hubris that makes us think that today’s nation-state borders are also somehow permanent and shall never be in flux again. Just as the United States may some day break apart, its vast hoard in Fort Knox will someday suffer the same fate as all previous gold hoards, spreading out again into the hinterlands until it is called home to rest in a new vault somewhere else.

As we will labor to show throughout this chapter, there is nothing “natural” about any of this, nor about the markets that influence gold’s movements. It is, in fact, the precise opposite of natural. It is profoundly human. To be clear, we are not arguing that markets always somehow follow some purported laws of nature and that governments must therefore “get out of the way.” We are arguing quite the opposite: that sometimes humanity works overtime to force certain commodities to “flow” in highly specific ways, even if this human effort and oversight is partly anarchic. Why humans craft this sort of reliable rhythm and trajectory for certain commodities is not really our task to discern—we are only concerned with learning how it occurred, so that we can learn from it to sequester carbon.

Whether moving as a result of extraction, theft, taxation, or trade, gold has, for several millennia, been inexorably tied up with the human pursuit of power. Somewhere along the path that it traverses, someone seeks to cease its movement and retain the gold for themselves. As we described in chapter 1, Annette Weiner discussed this tendency at great length in her landmark text, Inalienable Possessions (1992), where she claimed that much seeming “tit-for-tat” trading actually occurs because of a bigger fight over something that is not being exchanged. Though she was ostensibly speaking of family heirlooms and cultural treasures rather than basic monetary instruments, her insights apply equally to gold.

Because these immobilized heirlooms or treasures are talismanic, they exert a power that exceeds their straightforward market price (Weiner 1992, 36). They are seen as magical forces that add the sheen of power to whomever possesses them (e.g., the Crown Jewels of England). As a result, their current owners desperately seek to retain them, to not let them slip out of their grasp. According to Weiner, a primary tactic for ceasing the movement of “inalienable possessions” is to issue cheaper promissory notes upon them, which can then circulate as ersatz representations of the power that emanates from the immobilized object itself. Those who do not own the cherished valuable then join this game of circulating promises—partly to gain in some of the reflective sheen of the object’s power, and partly in the hopes that the holder will overissue, thereby pushing the object back onto a mobile path once again. Another anthropologist, Arjun Appadurai, helpfully referred to this process as a “tournament of value,” as he attempted to grapple with the strange fact that things seem to have a “social life” (1986).

Elsewhere (Peebles 2014), we have pointed out how Weiner’s theory of “keeping-while-giving” mimics what we see in generalized deposit banking. Applied to private banking, we see that “runs” on banks can sometimes cause them to simply “close the window,” a euphemism for suddenly refusing to participate in the “tournament of value” that had been set in motion by the bank’s inalienable possession (often gold or silver, but in a fiat system, cash and central bank reserves). In other words, the bank has overissued chits upon a cherished valuable, but when people come to try to grab the cherished valuable, the bank turns to brute power to announce the promissory chits as value-less. At other times, the bank will give back all the inalienable possessions in its vault, until it is broke (thereby serving as an example of a “cataclysm” that breaks up a hoard, sending it outward in centrifugal motion). Fascinatingly, central banks (as opposed to private banks) have yet another tactic in these instances, which is to simply declare that the promissory chits represent proportionately less of the immobilized inalienable possession than the holder had originally believed—a so-called “currency devaluation.”⁸

The point, regardless, is that across centuries and varying disciplinary traditions, both anthropologists and economists have recorded this exceedingly common human behavior. Both in monetary exchange and in the exchange of sacred valuables, there is always someone who is hoping to immobilize a cherished object, while there will be other people who can only hope to rely on diaphanous, proportional representations of it to acquire their daily needs (whether those needs are spiritual or material is no matter, for our purposes). Because these inalienable possessions represent social reproduction itself, the person or group that manages to immobilize them will gain in power relative to the person who must merely circulate cheap copies of them. Gresham’s Law (discussed in chapter 1) nicely encapsulates all of this, by pithily declaring that “bad money drives out good.” The lesser valuable continues to circulate, while the higher value gets driven into hoards.

Combined, Gresham and Weiner both help us understand, under one umbrella concept, the historical trajectories of gold. In domestic European economies, gold was often held by goldsmiths, royals, or banks, while a cheaper “black token money” would circulate against it; gold was too valuable to pay for most items for sale, so token money that represented it would circulate instead (see Vilar 1984, 173, passim, but also Sargent and Velde 2003). Importantly, these token moneys would circulate as local tallying markers, while gold was kept for larger international transactions. Not incidentally, this is a very general and very important trend: “less valuable” currencies (in a market sense) can only circulate as domestic signs of value within a local community of trust; outside the bounds of the community of trust, people prefer to rely on an international sign of value.

And thus, bankers—or those, like goldsmiths, who mimicked the services of bankers—are actually mediators between the local and the global. They incessantly and insistently push international signs of value into vaults to be used only for very large transactions, while most others in the economy are only seeking their “daily bread” and therefore use domestic token money, even if it is somehow a “ripoff” compared to the gold that it represents; importantly, much token money also gains its value from governments, by being the only token with which people can pay taxes.⁹

Gresham’s Law, therefore, isn’t necessarily a depiction of an ongoing tendency for people to swindle each other, but rather a depiction of class and power differentials: Those who are (willingly, at least some times) accepting the token money in exchange for their gold are doing so because they find it less cumbersome and because they need food and shelter more than they need their gold. Typically, they have less capacity not only to acquire an inalienable possession but also to cover the costs of protecting and immobilizing it. This affirms our belief, stated in chapter 1, that gold can be classed within Bataille’s understanding of generative excess: people trading it away in exchange for token money have decided that holding gold is far less important than finding basic necessities on the market; banks, on the other hand, have discovered the magical technique of converting this seemingly useless excess into an engine, so they pile it up as much as they can.

BARBARIC EXTRACTIONS¹⁰

The colonial system itself, along with these bankers, moved gold centripetally as well. A premier historian of gold, Pierre Vilar, explains that Columbus was excited to learn that the Native Americans would trade mere “trinkets” for gold (Vilar 1984, 64). In a similar vein, Toby Green informs us that the gradually enhancing power of European merchants largely derived from their love of gold, while West African locals were often willing to trade it away in exchange for something less valuable (Green 2019). But “less valuable” needs to be qualified here: Both the Native Americans and the West Africans surely knew what they wanted from these European traders, and they simply did not value gold as highly as the Europeans did. Perhaps other items trumped gold as inalienable possessions in their symbolic hierarchy, so they released it from their possession at seemingly below market rates, in exchange for things that they valued more. Perhaps this was a swindle; or perhaps they were simply not consumed by a pathological love of gold.¹¹

Indeed, this European love of gold was so all-consuming that Vilar informs us that “it was gold which unleashed the conquest of America and ensured that it was carried out in a rushed, haphazard and dispersed manner” (1984, 66). Columbus, he tells us, mentioned gold sixty-five times during a four-month stretch in his diary (63). But the power of gold is odder still, for Vilar further explains that “real gold and non-existent gold were equally important in the Discovery, the Conquest, and the Colonization of the Americas” (109). In other words, the mere aspirational myth of El Dorado and incessant ebullience over potential “rushes” played an enormous role in European settlement: “No gold was found, but vast areas were discovered and occupied” (108).¹²

Of course, not all gold was a mere fever dream. Europeans pillaged North and South American gold in at least two ways. First, there was the rank and violent seizure of Native gold that had been built up in royal hoards over many generations. In one fell swoop, for example, Pizarro infamously ransomed the Incan emperor Atahualpa in exchange for all his golden treasures, while Cortes did much the same in Mexico.¹³ Much of this ornate artwork was callously melted down and shipped to Seville, lost to human history while serving as an immense windfall for the Spanish empire. These sacred treasures were Weinerian inalienable possessions par excellence, only re-entering the world of circulation through the wanton death and destruction of the community that had held them sacred. In the process, they altered their status from intricate and decommodified sacraments to fungible pounds of commodity gold.

The second method of pillage in the American colonies is harder to quantify but perhaps more important for the arguments of this book. As Vilar details, much of the gold dragged out of North and South America’s hills and rivers required brutal enslavement—first of Native Americans and then of transported Africans. Indeed, Vilar tells us that “the Spaniards, according to Chaunu, regarded this labour as freely given to them, like air or water” (113). The vast profit margins of carrying American gold back to Europe, in other words, only occurred because of immoral and violent expropriation of others’ labor. Had the Spanish and Portuguese had to pay a fair wage to the laborers who extracted the gold and silver, perhaps it would have proven to be uneconomical to mine it in the first place.

We are consistently told that gold gradually achieved its supremacy as a store of value and a medium of exchange because it “costs less to produce than it fetches in exchange.” This—quite viciously—ignores how gold’s rise came on the back of all this unpaid labor. Instead, we can quickly see how North and South American gold only rose to prominence because of a vast array of agreed-upon political decisions, legal doctrines, and bureaucratic regulatory support that allowed for a central element of its production costs (human labor) to trend toward zero (to say nothing of “transferring” land titles through violence rather than market prices). To summarily dismiss the capacity of carbon to back currency because its market price is “too cheap” compared to its production costs forgets all of this sociopolitical infrastructure that assisted gold in getting to market.¹⁴

In the Spanish system, once the gold was mined, it was brought to administrative centers of the empire. Small producers would carry unrefined gold to the mint. There, it would be assayed, refined, and minted. At that point, the “king’s fifth” would also be retained by the royal attaché (Vilar 1984, 108). The 80 percent that did not go to the king had a more circuitous route back to Spain, which is nonetheless instructive, for it illustrates our claims above. As the American colonies were exploding, a standard class hierarchy emerged. As we all know, most class hierarchies demand “prestige goods” so that class distinctions can be displayed for the public gaze (e.g., Fussel 1992; Smith 2011; and Veblen 2009). As a result, precious metals had a tendency to leave the Americas, as the newly minted bourgeoisie traded its newly minted coin for European and Asian prestige goods.

This explains the paradox that gold and silver were produced locally in the Americas but that these territories remained cash-poor for long stretches, forcing them to base their local trade on credit rather than the (relatively) abundant local metal (Vilar 1984, 137). But it also stands as further testimony that many “ordinary” people chose to not hoard gold. Rather, they willingly traded it away in order to acquire not only their daily bread but also precious goods a bit higher up the ladder that could be displayed. Banks and kings, on the other hand, tended to have such a large surplus that they certainly displayed their wealth, but they could also afford to bury some of it as well.

All of this gold—both the king’s fifth and the gold needed to import luxury goods—then needed to traverse the Atlantic, in order to pay the king and to balance the books with the merchants that had extended credit to the colonies. By royal order, Seville’s “House of Trade” became the bottleneck through which all of this gold could land in Europe, taking in both unrefined ore and minted coin that had come from the Americas.¹⁵ The House of Trade would issue reliable currency or promissory notes in exchange for the gold that arrived at its doorstep, thereby following our standard story of gold being exchanged for paper, with the latter circulating and the former coming to rest (Vilar 1984, 151; see also Lane 2019). The gold, scattered in native treasuries and inhospitable mountains across the Americas, had come to rest in the king’s treasury. As it grew, so too did the king’s power.

And yet this hoard did not grow forever. Instead, despite taking his endless fifths, the Spanish king and his court suffered the same fate as the American bourgeoisie, just along a different time horizon. Much has been written about the “gold drain” of the Spanish Empire, wherein all of this precious metal flooding into Europe not only caused inflation but also resulted in new heights of opulence.¹⁶ And much of the opulence came in the form of prestige goods from Asia (Sahlins 1989; Vilar 1984, 166). More and more people in the mother country, including the king himself, needed their trinkets, and willingly traded their gold for them (the king also had massive debts for other reasons). As Spain allowed its inalienable possession to dissipate hither and yon, its empire also dissipated and was gradually usurped by rising European powers such as Holland and England.

As the theory of inalienable possessions would predict, Holland then becomes famous for growing—and managing—a vast gold hoard at the Bank of Amsterdam. Indeed, van Dillen quotes an eyewitness who explains the concept, avant la lettre, of “monetary sterilization,” when he explains how gold arrived in Europe sporadically, in an arrhythmic oscillation between drought and deluge:

Europe is suddenly inundated with gold and silver in quantities far above what is needed, so that they would decline in value if they were put into circulation all at once. In such an eventuality, the people of Amsterdam deposited the metal in ingots in the Bank, where it was kept for them at a very low cost, and they took it out a little at a time to send to different countries as the increase in the rate warrants it.… the whole of Europe is in its debt for the greater stability of prices. (cited in Vilar 1984, 209)

In other words, the Bank of Amsterdam could choose whether to issue more or less credit, unconcerned with any “explosion of its balance sheet” that is discussed frequently today.¹⁷

While that early instance of advanced monetary policy is instructive, it feels unnecessary—even boring—to rehearse the trajectories of Amsterdam and London, and to trace how they more or less mimicked Seville/Madrid (see Braudel 1992). The brute facts are undeniable: scattered gold is mined in distant locales and then pulled toward the metropoles that rule over them; maybe the taxes or export laws varied, but the end result was always the same. The most significant difference across these cycles appears as a purely administrative development: the creation of central banks. Covered by a great many authors (e.g., Archer and Moser-Boehm 2013; Grossman 2010; Tucker 2018; Wansleben 2023), central banks begin blossoming in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, following their first invention in Sweden and England in the seventeenth century.

GRAVITATIONAL BANKS

As a stepping stone to the tale of the international gold standard, central banks also illuminate the principle of gravitational banking that we discuss throughout our book. Often born out of a desire to bring monetary order out of monetary chaos, central banks are typically designed to drive private banks out of the business of issuing currency, in order to replace a territory’s myriad private currencies with one public currency. Aside from perhaps some famous examples from communist countries, they are typically not designed to drive private banks out of business altogether, but rather to serve as a governmental banker to these private banks. This structure keeps them nested within a hierarchy of private banks, standing as the foundation of the entire linked system. As a result, sometimes they are only the most powerful banks in the system because of their governmental prerogatives, rather than the size of their reserves (Buiter 2008).

One such prerogative is their ability to “cry up” or “cry down” the currency. In the language developed here, this means that a central bank can, by mere fiat, alter the proportional claims of a circulating currency upon the (largely) immobilized reserves. A seemingly simple innovation, this means that—unlike all other banks up to this point—central banks never need to declare bankruptcy.¹⁸ While this capacity is frequently cited as a humdrum tool of modern monetary management, it is far more than that. Ultimately, it serves as a brilliant—though undiscussed—tactic for preserving and immobilizing gold hoards, for the hoard no longer needs to be depleted in a run. In effect, this one tiny tactic ceases the eternal battle over the ownership of inalienable possessions. With their control over currency, central banks announce to the public that the gold has come to rest, that it will never again slip outside the bounds of the state, much less the vaults of the people’s bank.¹⁹

Consequently, in a supreme twist of irony and in broad daylight, central banks have religiously enacted the mercantilist “fetishism” of metals that Adam Smith and his many followers over several centuries have all decried as pure idiocy. Throughout the ages, export restrictions against gold have been as common as they were ridiculed. Largely abandoned as ineffectual, in reality central banks have made them unnecessary, for all the gold sits safely ensconced behind four walls, protected not only by the vault but also by central banks’ capacity to cry down the currency.²⁰

Yet it is important to not lose sight of the opposing historical tendency, wherein the “common people” could—under a metal standard—still contest central banks’ control over centralized hoards. Infamously, regular people could “clip” or “sweat” circulating coins in order to seize some of the metal that the central bank claimed as its own. In these instances, regular citizens, instead of the government, were debasing the coinage, effectively enacting a “democratized” form of monetary management. Once a valuable metal coin was in their hands, people discovered that they could shave off tiny slices of it to keep for themselves; taking a tiny slice from each coin that passed through their hands could eventually lead to a large enough sum of money to justify the labor and the risk. “Milling”—the practice of placing lines along the edge of coins—was invented so that average people could easily spot a clipped coin and refuse it. Alternatively, “sweating” involved vigorously shaking a bag of coins and collecting the dust that resulted (Caffentzis 2021; Desan 2014). Like counterfeiting, these mundane techniques should actually be seen as contestations of the central bank’s right to sequester its hoard. In the face of gold’s seeming tendency to move centripetally, clippers, shavers, and counterfeiters all cajoled (rightly or wrongly) portions of it to move centrifugally, back toward “the people.”

The bygone era of clipping and sweating reveals that inalienable possessions are always contested, even when those in power believe they’ve ingeniously parried all potential attacks. Nevertheless, in response to notorious popular techniques of debasement, governments gradually discovered still more effective tactics for protecting their hoards. Eventually, the precious metal content of coins was withdrawn altogether, eliminating the threats of clipping and sweating in one fell swoop. To this day, governments still must contend with counterfeiters, but certainly one of the intuitive appeals of central bank digital currencies is that they promise to end this endemic practice as well. Even though these ongoing battles between “democratized” and elite methods of monetary management have been documented by specialists and the popular press over many centuries, it is also important to turn to this history simply to show how powerful forces in the world can, when they put their mind to it, maintain hoards of precious goods against all comers. It takes social effort, but we have no reason to believe that it is out of reach.

DECOMMODIFIED HOARDS

Inalienable possessions are surprisingly similar to a more familiar term: “decommodification.” Because people seem to crave simple black-and-white categories, often the dialectics of both inalienable possessions / alienable possessions and of commodification/decommodification are lost on people. In reality—stretched out on an epochal scale—nothing is ever truly decommodified, just as an inalienable possession can, indeed, be alienated. For example, we typically believe that welfare states have decommodified education. By removing it from price structures and making it available at near-zero cost, welfare states have pronounced a desire to remove market logic from schooling, whereas earlier epochs thought it was entirely normal for some families to have money to send their children to school and for other families to need to send them to work (see Esping-Andersen 1990).

Despite this popular understanding, we all know that market-based logic is constantly chipping away at welfare-state education systems by agitating for changes in legislatures and by offering up new workarounds such as charter schools. Inalienable possessions are the same: people believe that Fort Knox will hold its gold for an eternity, or that England will never relinquish its Crown Jewels. But someday, in a perhaps very distant future, they will reenter the marketplace. It is, therefore, better to think of spectrums and dialectics rather than firm eternities. Achieving decommodification of a good is, therefore, always partly aspirational, and it must be actively maintained, just as Weiner says of inalienable possessions.

Nevertheless, during the time period when they stand on the inalienable possessions and decommodification end of this spectrum, these goods become “priceless.” And one of the most standard tactics for converting a good from priced to priceless is to declare it sacred. After all, one of sacrality’s central characteristics is that it cannot be bought or sold; “the sacred” is often that which a collective public deems “beyond the market” and thus truly without price. For example, Scientology’s transparent sale of its sacred wisdom raises widespread distrust that it might not actually be a religion, just as Martin Luther denounced the Catholic Church for selling pathways to salvation. Generally speaking, we recoil when we hear of dogma and doctrine being sold to the highest bidder. But there are countless other examples of this idea that the sacred should not be bought and sold—we typically do not, for example, think that body parts should have a market price. Or what of the quasi-religious sensibility that the British supposedly hold for their National Health Service? The love for the NHS transcends many standard political oppositions, denoting that Britons believe that the health of the citizenry should be passionately defended via nonmarket principles. The same is true for most Americans’ feelings about their national parks.

We should now return to our argument from chapter 1 that there is significant overlap between the “work of temples” and the “work of banks.” The architecture of banks leaves no room for subtlety—they are clearly designed to mimic ancient religious temples (and many religious temples today and in the past have doubled as vaults for gold; see Barbanel 2015). For example, the interior of the Williamsburgh Savings Bank in Brooklyn, New York, is even laid out in the figure of a cross, just like a standard cathedral. If this harmonic convergence were ever discussed, it would likely be in the castigating language of “bankers are the new priests,” “Mammon has triumphed,” and suchlike. But what if, instead, this architecture merely intends to send the message that “herein lies our sacred inalienable possession,” a type of relic that must be guarded with both the spiritual power of shared belief and the material power of a locked vault?

Gold, according to this logic, gradually became a sacred valuable in much of the world that saw the iterative spread of deposit and central banking. Yes, of course, it has always had a “price,” and while it was still behaving like a standard commodity, it even moved against other goods. Slowly but surely, however, it trended toward the innermost sanctums of these temples, not to be seen or touched by the common man. For a long period (as discussed below), it was only moved between central banks to clear international account balances, but even that fell into abeyance, and now it merely sits, even if the owner is a central bank across an ocean.²¹

Eventually, some countries made it illegal to even hold gold (beyond jewelry and certain places, like dentists’ offices), so even though it carried a nominal price, it was—for all intents and purposes—off the market and thus decommodified. The untouchable gold in Fort Knox stands as a paradigmatic example, but the Bundesbank also comes to mind. It refused to even re-price its gold hoard according to current prices, keeping it at the original purchase price for decades, thereby announcing, effectively, that it was not even thinking about selling it. It was only when the Bundesbank had to meet the strict “convergence criteria” of the eurozone that it considered marking its gold to market, to pretend as though it might sell it if the need arose.²² Bytheway and Metzler confirm all of this when they authoritatively state, “During the First World War, central banks came to control most of the world’s gold, which could not be freely traded and was no longer a commodity in any normal sense” (2016, 6).

This gradual move of gold from profane to sacred traces the rise of central bank power and the rise of the international gold standard—and thus the effective central bank hoarding of the majority of gold on the market. As Knafo clarifies, “the history of the gold standard was to a great extent the story of the rise of central banking” (2013, 127).²³

CIVILIZED RESERVES

Though many origin stories could surely be told, England puts the international gold standard into high gear with its 1844 Bank Charter Act. Emerging on the heels of both the suspension of gold convertibility during the Napoleonic Wars and the robust “currency-versus-banking school” debate, the 1844 act sought to address the chaotic proliferation of private currencies then circulating. Driven by the rapid expansion of the “country banks,” Britain had myriad private notes in circulation, all related to one another by way of the discounting offered by the London money market. Economist John Fullarton nicely encapsulates much of the arguments made here, when he outlines a “sponge mechanism” that drives the English banking system. In effect, he argues that local bank hoards²⁴ grow during times of economic uncertainty, whereas during times of stability, these same hoards release chunks of their holdings, thereby increasing the availability of circulating money. As the Industrial Revolution gathers steam and more and more capitalists start seeking out sounder and sounder money, this sponge mechanism gradually causes these local hoards to migrate to the Bank of England (see Peebles 2008). As Fullarton clarifies, “In this country, where the banking system has been carried to an extent and perfection unknown in any other part of Europe … the incentives to private hoarding exist no longer, and the hoards have all been transferred to the banks, or rather, I should say, to the Bank of England” (1844, 72).

The 1844 Bank Charter Act significantly curtailed private issuance by country banks, but it also set a promised exchange ratio between Bank of England notes and its gold reserve. It’s worth recalling that, at this stage, the Bank of England was still a private bank, in a highly choreographed dance with public authorities: “It was precisely the state’s attempts to discipline the Bank of England through the gold standard that created the conditions for central banking” (Knafo 2013, 127).²⁵ (Incidentally, the willingness of the British Parliament to put its thumbs on the scale of a vast and important market should serve as a reasonable nudge to our own policymakers during our time of climate crisis.) As Knafo so clearly relates, the Bank Charter Act caused a stir and dramatically impacted the business plans of many wealthy Britons and the private institutions they had built. And yet the world did not melt down, despite their vociferous complaints; indeed, Britain only rose in prominence in the decades that followed.

With its new demand that gold bullion formally back the pound, the 1844 act created a new demand for increased liquidity that rippled across the banking system. At the same time that it limited note issue by private country banks, it did not discourage deposits from forming that could expand the amount of money in circulation via alternative methods. Consequently, deposit banking flourished, meaning that more gold rushed into the banks as people sought to not only place it in safe hands but also to use it as collateral for loans. Between the years of 1844 and 1857, total deposits in England “jumped from £9,000,000 to £43,000,000 and the number of bank branches rapidly multiplied” (Knafo 2013, 155).

The banking edifice built in the wake of the 1844 act pressured the Bank of England into an increasingly public role, despite its ongoing attempts to guard its private incentive structure (not the least of which was its competition with other banks). In this period of ferment, it gradually developed several of the storied tactics of central banking: discount windows, open market operations, and “gold devices.” The growing pressure to serve as a public “lender of last resort” dovetailed with its own private interest in retaining its gold reserve, meaning that these monetary policy tools “were … pioneered with the simple aim of protecting the Bank’s reserves” (Knafo 2013, 164).

As other countries began to notice the flexibility and power that derived from implementing a gold standard, they adopted it themselves. Indeed, well-attended international monetary conferences were held in both 1867 and 1878 in order to try to build an international monetary standard (namely, gold); these conferences mimicked other budding efforts to set international standards in weights and measures (see Einaudi 2000; Peebles 2011). Be that as it may, the British did not seek to lend a hand in this development and were not in attendance. Perhaps they were acutely aware, as Knafo states, that “the extension of the gold standard meant that competition over gold reserves became more intense, since gold was now called on to sustain the monetary circulation of more countries” (2013, 160).

During this developmental phase, the Bank of England turned to these new tools of monetary management, as well as to its colonial possessions, in order to keep (and grow) the gold within its coffers. For example, suddenly competing with the New York gold market, the Bank of England found itself offering interest-free loans on 97% of a gold bar’s value simply to keep it from migrating across the Atlantic (Knafo 2013, 172). On the other hand, a persistent trade surplus in its prized colony—India—meant that it needed to rely on brute force rather than market appeals to repatriate gold that had landed in India. To do so, Britain first forced India onto a silver standard, thereby pushing down the cost of gold in India relative to the United Kingdom (Knafo 2013). Additionally, it created an elaborate trade in “Council Bills” that kept the Reserve Bank of India’s gold in the vaults of the Bank of England (see Balachandran 2015, 6, 30, passim; Iyer 2020). This tactic, Knafo explains, “became, in fact, a standard solution for many colonies” (2013, 171). Later, the colonies were forced onto a sterling standard, which demanded that a colony’s reserve gold be kept, physically, in London. This relationship between unequal governments mimicked not only what we have already seen between individual depositors and banks but also what we will later see in the Bretton Woods system: currency units (in this case, “pound sterling,” but in Bretton Woods, US dollars) were offered against the collateral deposited in the form of gold.

Brute power manifested itself in an entirely different way in South Africa, which, at that time, was one of the chief producers of gold. Aside from the sheer terror and violence of the mining operations themselves (see Breckenridge 1998; Moodie 2005), South African gold arrived in London “every week ensuring a constant flow of gold to Britain” (Knafo, 2013, 171). Inventing “gold devices,” the Bank of England secured “preferential access to gold” (Knafo 2013, 172; see also Ferry 2016, 2020, 2021). Aside from the gold devices (in short, various tactics to ensure it acquired a sort of “right of first refusal” over all the gold arriving in London), several scholars contend that the Boer War “was motivated by the desire of Britain to secure its major source of gold” (Knafo 2013, 171; see also Bytheway and Metzler 2016, 22). Even if that’s a contested claim, it is undebatable that the United Kingdom refused to apply pure market logics to its colonial holdings; perhaps fabrics and foodstuffs could be sold on a global “free” market, but colonial spaces were manifestly refused entrée to the international gold market. The United Kingdom, in other words, had elevated gold to its own inalienable possession; just as Weiner’s idea suggests, other goods could circulate around it, and sometimes it slipped out of their hands, but the overall goal was to keep as much gold as possible in the Bank of England’s vaults.

SOVEREIGN EXCEPTIONS

As the international gold standard ascended toward its apex, London lost ground to other powers, not least to the United States, Japan, and France, among others. The details of all the movements of gold across the planet are both bewildering and endless, and these movements have already been expertly covered by quite a vast literature, including Eichengreen (1992) and Bytheway and Metzler (2016), along with many others. Ultimately, we are only concerned with showing how this phase first consolidated these national hoards and then how this phase eventually brought the international gold standard to a permanent close.²⁶ With the end of the gold standard, gold’s ceaseless and centuries-long wandering comes to an end.

The well-known economist Gustav Cassel reported “from the front lines” of this era and blasted jeremiads at all the people who neglectfully allowed the gold footing of the international system to collapse. From the heights of rationalism, Cassel castigated the policymakers and central bankers who allowed national prejudices to blind them to international interests. If they could merely cooperate better, the gold standard could be saved, but instead they embraced competition and self-interest. Looking backward from the demise, he acknowledged that the gold standard was unlikely to ever return, only because of humanity’s benighted inability to listen to scientists like him.

Fascinatingly, Cassel recognized that the value of gold that grounded the system was but a social construct. On this point, he is worth citing at length:

[T]he total gold demand from the various Central Banks must exercise an important influence upon the value of gold. That demand, however, is largely conventional, influenced by fashion in conjunction with rather arbitrary legal enactments, and not determined by any objective economic need. Practically the whole world adopted the Gold Standard which from this point of view had undeniably achieved a magnificent conquest.… But beyond that there seems to have been ascribed to gold reserves some semi-mystical significance for the value of the currency.… Obviously we have here a last survival of long-discredited ideas of value as a kind of fluid which material objects somehow absorb into themselves.… while under the influence of superstitions of the nature described, the really essential problems concerning the rational regulation of currency were pushed into the background.… The only practical function of the reserves was to guarantee the redemption of the currency in gold. When now these reserves, painfully accumulated for decades, could at last have been used for their real purpose, they were left untouched. The maintenance of gold reserves, in reality a subordinate means for the protection of the Gold Standard, was now promoted to be itself the true purpose, and the one important thing, the Gold Standard, was abandoned. Official proclamations during the war strove hard to uphold the superstitious idea that the gold reserve as such had some peculiar power of conferring value which it could infuse into the currency. In different countries the governments tried to gather in the circulating gold coinage therewith to strengthen the gold reserve of the Central Bank, and ardent appeals were made to patriotic feelings to persuade the possessors of gold money to surrender it for the support of the currency! (Cassel 1932, 7–9)

This extended quote perfectly displays the hubris of the modern scientist. Instead of treating the “semi-mystical significance” as itself a fact of social life, Cassel cannot believe that he lives in an era so benighted that enlightened humans cannot simply explode this “superstition.” Even when he is well aware that “practically the whole world” had adopted this belief, he still could not abide that the belief should have power, since it is manifestly untrue that there is a magical ether connecting paper chits to gold hoards. So he voices frustration over all the decades of lost social and economic labor that went into building up those gold hoards, only to discover that no one was willing to use them for their ostensible, “rational” purpose when the time came.

Weiner’s theory, on the other hand, much more eloquently captures precisely what occurred. Rather than dismissing the attitudes of people and governments toward public treasures, she acknowledges those beliefs as social facts that have real power in the world (regardless of how “untrue” the basis of the belief itself) and then investigates the consequences that result from it.

And what the hard data shows is that more and more governments followed the mystical superstition rather than the science. While there was an impressive array of cooperation over the gold standard (particularly highlighted by Eichengreen 1992 and Bytheway and Metzler 2016), countries nevertheless constantly opted to not follow the “rules of the game” (as Keynes called them). During this era, gold was used for the same thing as before—to settle large international payments, as well as to serve as the “monetary base” for the circulating medium. But all too often, no one wanted to share their inalienable possession. However “rational” it may have been to defend the gold standard (as Cassel counseled), it would have required dispersing their hoard. In the event, governments preferred to protect their hoard over protecting the standard.

For example, Bytheway and Metzler recount how Japan had an enormous claim on the Bank of England’s gold holdings, at one point reaching 64% of its reserve (2016, 13). Memos the authors found in the archives denote fears of export and the “alarm” it might cause if word spread. At one point, Japan needed to draw down on this account to pay Chinese indemnities. Bytheway and Metzler write, “The form in which these payments were transferred is telling. Some 52% of these funds were withdrawn as Bank of England gold-convertible banknotes; this was the method most advantageous to the Bank of England. Another 10 % was taken in the form of silver bullion.… Only 38% was taken as gold bullion ‘London Gold Delivery’ bars” (2016, 14–15). In other words, the Bank of England negotiated concessions so that the total claim on the gold did not need to be settled in gold proper.

As the Wicksell quote in chapter 1 about “senseless and purposeless” transfers of gold attests, these sorts of large shipments of gold among central banks and treasuries went back and forth over a significant period of time. Indeed, the gold remitted to Japan in the story above returned but a few years later (Bytheway and Metzler 2016, 14 and 17). The Bank of England tried to follow Walter Bagehot’s [1912] advice to lend one’s treasure liberally, but this did not stop it from using the interest rate to bolster reserves that it thought were flagging, explaining in 1909 that “The Bank rate [the interest rate charged to other banks] is raised with the object either of preventing gold from leaving the country, or of attracting gold to the country” (quoted in Bytheway and Metzler 2016, 22).

At the dawn of World War I, the desire to cajole gold to stay in a given country became an edict. In the United Kingdom, the Defence of the Realm Act of 1914 “prohibited the private export of gold” (Bytheway and Metzler 2016, 33). Though the United Kingdom claimed, de jure, to still be on a gold standard, other countries soon discovered that the outbreak of war meant that Britain would no longer allow repatriation of foreign gold (33). Consequently, the outbreak of international hostilities allowed the international banking community to suddenly realize that gold was but a tallying technique that could easily be replaced (assuming trust still existed). Though it seems odd that it took a war to enlighten people to this possibility, the fact remains that after World War I began, “[t]o aid in settling international payments … the Bank of England turned to central-banking techniques that it had long used in order to settle accounts between British banks at the national level” (Bytheway and Metzler 2016, 33). Domestic tallying burst the bounds of the nation-state and went international, which amounted to a tacit understanding that the gold could remain in the Bank of England’s vaults.

Nevertheless, Britain’s new stance toward gold opened a window for the United States to storm in to challenge London’s position as the epicenter of global liquidity. The creation of the US Federal Reserve on the eve of the war may have facilitated the ascent of American banking over its British counterpart. Not abandoning the gold standard until 1917 certainly helped too, causing gold to come rushing into the US. But the US also found other ways to increase its gold holdings, grimly seizing Haiti’s gold reserves on behalf of American bankers in 1915 and transporting them via warship to New York City (Bytheway and Metzler 2016, 43–45; Hudson 2017).²⁷

As Bytheway and Metzler recount, America’s return to a de facto gold standard in 1919—ahead of all its peers—set gold in motion after the war. This time, gold rushed out of the US, causing international inflation (Bytheway and Metzler 2016, 73). Enough returned to other central bank vaults that eventually other countries could return to the gold standard. Thus, as the 1920s got underway, so too did the standardization of central banking itself. New York and London collaborated to spread their gospel of inalienable possessions, creating elite peer institutions in other zones where credit needed to flow seamlessly. A conference in Brussels resolved that “in countries where there is no central Bank of Issue, one should be established” (quoted in Bytheway and Metzler 2016, 96). This movement pushed for what we now consider the sine qua non of central banking, which is “independence” from their governments. But it also called for collaboration among central banks, in particular by offering both the extension and “custody” of other central banks’ gold (Bytheway and Metzler 2016, 99).

These modularized forms of central banking spread out from London and New York’s proposals (Bytheway and Metzler 2016, 101). Importantly, they were “birthed” from these more original forms, which thus included tight networks of collaboration and training. Not least, the Genoa Conference of 1922 broached the key Weinerian tactic of issuing cheaper chits in order to retain the higher valuable. It is worth quoting Bytheway and Metzler at length here:

The first principle was general restoration of currency convertibility, to be based on the gold exchange standard rather than the prewar gold specie standard. That is, gold-backed currencies, meaning US dollars (and prospectively, British pounds) would be able to serve in place of gold in other countries’ central-bank reserves as the basis for the issue of domestic paper money. This meant a kind of double-leveraging of gold.… Historian Harold James has called this technique ‘a generalization of the prewar Japanese or Indian practice’ (106; emphasis in original).

In other words, what was previously relied upon within a smaller community based on hierarchical trust (or colonial/hegemonic enforcement) was exported beyond original colonial models.

This brings us to still another tactic employed to grow national reserves: so-called “sterilization.” Long ago, David Hume had outlined what is well known as the “price-specie flow” mechanism, which has given wind to free-marketeers’ sails ever since. Under this model, gold flows can temporarily be weighted toward one country, but in a true free-trade system, this influx would then cause price inflation. This inflation would, in turn, cause the gold to move abroad again, seeking higher returns. Hume’s model is another example of Casselian love of “laboratory” settings, where everyone behaves rationally. Alas, the model does not include power politics; in other words, it neglects Weiner’s insights.

So as a deluge of gold washed upon America’s shores in the early 1920s, the Federal Reserve curtailed Hume’s simple model by “sterilizing” the gold that arrived. That is, it was sequestered and hoarded away, without being allowed to become part of the “monetary base.” Bytheway and Metzler quote the Fed Chairman Benjamin Strong writing to his Japanese counterpart that “[we] must absorb it and put it away temporarily until the world comes to its senses and readjusts its monetary systems.” After quoting Strong, Bytheway and Metzler bluntly reaffirm our central thesis: “Thus, the world’s gold was dug out of the ground only to be reinterred in American depositories” (2016, 111).

Meanwhile, the Bank of England’s governor was busy sterilizing gold in a more secretive manner, creating the irony that “for the foremost advocate and practitioner of the policy of restoring the international gold standard, the supposed ‘rules’ of the gold-standard game were an elaborate charade” (Bytheway and Metzler 2016, 112). Yet it is only an “irony” if one fails to understand how inalienable possessions operate. Once you frame all this through a Weinerian lens, the elaborate system of collaboration, competition, and trust (all, nevertheless, built upon hierarchy and power) would predictably mean that the top of the pyramid would create rules that should be diligently followed by those below; but these same rules should obviously be abandoned on a moment’s notice by the “king of the hill.”

The appearance of rank “hypocrisy,” in other words, is the warp and woof of protecting inalienable possessions. In more current social-science jargon, this behavior is referred to as the “sovereign exception”: install a rule-based order that necessarily gathers its force of application from the fact that the ultimate holder of sovereignty remains outside of the same rule-based system that it enforces (see Agamben 1998; Schmitt 2006).

One of the paramount examples of the sovereign exception, as it plays out in American monetary history, must surely be President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s actions with regard to gold during the Great Depression. The gold standard system had already, for decades, been based on a sovereign exception—for example, private citizens could not export gold, but central banks could; private banks could no longer issue currency, but central banks could, etc. But all of this paled in comparison to a series of legislative maneuvers implemented in 1933 and 1934. Citing a banking emergency (in actuality, by federal law the Treasury needed gold so that more US dollars could be issued to address a shortage of dollars), with Executive Order 6102, FDR criminalized the holding and purchasing of gold by regular Americans—even if held abroad.²⁸ This came on the heels of what Bytheway and Metzler refer to as “a series of runs on gold-backed currencies. Viewed now from a sufficient distance in time, the events of 1930–33 appear as a single globalized run on central-bank gold reserves. This run on gold reserves was largely conducted by the private banks” (2016, 145).

This run triggered the nationalization of gold, “converted by mandatory state directives into a strategic commodity to be held only in national treasuries and central banks” (Bytheway and Metzler 2016, 145). In the American case, Executive Order 6102 directed all citizens to deliver their personal gold holdings to the Federal Reserve, in exchange for $20.67 per troy ounce. In a stroke of cunning that would be deemed nefarious if practiced by a private owner, the government then, less than a year later, announced that all the gold in its possession was suddenly worth 41% more, or $35 per troy ounce. FDR followed this Executive Order with 1934’s Gold Reserve Act, which severed the right of citizens to redeem their dollars for gold (Bytheway and Metzler 2016, 160). The currency they held was still based on gold stored in a vault, but they would simply have to trust that it sat there; they no longer had the right to go grab their aliquot portion of the national hoard. Long critiqued as an “irrational fetish” when held by individuals, gold now became fetishized at the national level. With the Gold Reserve Act, the government insisted on its right to hoard gold while jealously and fearfully eliminating the supposed threat of more small-time hoarders.

The Gold Reserve Act’s provisions against individual buying and selling of (monetary) gold²⁹ held sway until 1974, when President Ford passed a new law that superseded the 1934 act. And it is not a coincidence that Ford’s new law could only emerge in the wake of President Nixon’s full severing of the gold standard, in 1971. But we are getting ahead of ourselves.

Instead, we need to highlight how FDR’s gold maneuvers impacted the global flow of gold in at least two important ways. First, by making a fiat pronouncement that the USA would buy gold for 41% more than it had previously, there was a predictable rush of gold into the United States. In their landmark text A Monetary History of the United States (1963), Friedman and Schwartz detail a quintupling of the gold reserves between 1934 and 1941; likewise, Bytheway and Metzler inform us that this episode caused “perhaps 70%” of the entire world’s globe to land in the United States (2016, 162). Global holders of gold leapt at the opportunity to sell at a higher price, shipping gold into American coffers in exchange for more dollars. For example, two hundred metric tons of gold was easily pulled out of the Bank of France in a single month and sold to the United States; unable to sustain such losses, the Bank of France was forced off of the gold standard in 1936 (Green 1999, 13). Not surprisingly, this is the precise era when we built our temple in Kentucky, Fort Knox.

Second, the new bid for gold by the United States also triggered a mad dash to increase the production of gold. We are told that “world output doubled to a new record of 1,200 m.t. [metric tons] by 1940” (Green 1999, 13). Not surprisingly, the US became the monopsony purchaser of all this new production: “Effectively, there was one buyer of gold in the world—the US Treasury. It has been estimated that between 1930 and 1939 while new mine supply was 9,126 m.t., the addition to monetary stock was 10,634 m.t., meaning the official sector took every last ounce of mine output and then some dishoarded gold too” (Green 1999, 13). This transparent drive to gobble up as much of the world’s gold stock as possible is nothing short of gobsmacking, in light of endless hectoring by bankers and economists that we should all stop fetishizing precious metals and focus instead on transactions. Capitalism for the masses, mercantilism for the sovereign. More importantly, it proves, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that a government can successfully sequester an element from the periodic table, if the fancy strikes it.

GOLD AT JOURNEY’S END

All of this brings us to the world-renowned “Bretton Woods Agreement.” Bretton Woods formed the foundation of the post–World War II monetary order until its collapse in 1971, which then ushered in the age of “floating exchange rates,” where our long tale of gold’s global sequestration ends. Like all the episodes covered in this chapter, there are entire wings of academic research dedicated to Bretton Woods, and we cannot rehash all the technical debates and archival discoveries here. Instead, our goal is simply to provide the basics, so that we may better understand the overall arc of gold’s movement in world history.

Say what you will of Bretton Woods, it represents a high-water mark of technocratic coordination and cooperation across international borders. There were, of course, tensions and even competitive undermining among the Bretton Woods signatories, but in general, it organized a massive international technocracy that monitored the world’s monetary system. Insofar as this book argues that monetary policy can help combat the world’s climate crisis, this aspect of Bretton Woods is worth highlighting.

Impacted by their experiences during the age of the gold standard, the Great Depression, and World War II, John Maynard Keynes and Harry Dexter White (an economist at the US Treasury) offered competing visions for a new world monetary order. Hashing out a firm consensus in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, they created the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Bolstered by this powerful new bureaucracy, the Bretton Woods system hoped to deliver sound money to the world, seeking a happy medium between floating and fixed exchange rates (Steil 2013).

For our purposes, the most fascinating aspect of this new international architecture was the decision to base it on a pyramid of gold and dollars. That is, the US promised to convert dollars for its vast gold holdings at a guaranteed rate of $35 per troy ounce; in turn, the other countries in the system agreed to peg their currencies to the dollar. Because of the vast cooperation and the aid of the IMF, this offered a measure of protection for the US’s gold holdings, though in theory countries could come to the US Treasury to demand gold in payment.³⁰

Countries were expected to turn to standard central bank tactics to keep their currency pegged within 1 percent of their dollar peg, and they could borrow from the IMF centralized fund to maintain this. In effect, this meant that central banks were now pushing and pulling US dollars around the globe as a reserve asset, rather than gold, which now stayed put in Lower Manhattan and Fort Knox. As for the rest of the system, the IMF oversaw the “par value” of currencies, meaning that countries could apply to move their peg if it was no longer adequate to market conditions. The IMF could also penalize countries that did not seek permission for an alteration of their peg, as it did with France in 1948 (see Eichengreen 2019, 102). Finally, Bretton Woods sanctioned the practice of “capital controls,” allowing countries to limit the export of capital as still another tactic in their monetary-stability toolkits.

Economists such as Triffin (1946; see Eichengreen 1995, 203) were soon pointing out that the Bretton Woods system could easily become unstable. If global economic growth increased the overall demand for currency, and if that surging amount of currency was all ultimately convertible to gold, there could be a run on the dollar. Sure enough, the London gold market delivered on Triffin’s prophecy, raising the price of gold above $35 in October 1960. In a normal market, this would cause a ripe opportunity for “arbitrage”: simply buy gold from the US Treasury and then turn around and sell it for a higher price elsewhere. At a minimum, it threatened the US’s access to newly produced gold, which would instead now go to a higher bidder.

Instead, in a remarkable display of intergovernmental solidarity, an international “Gold Pool” was created in 1961 to respond to these market shifts. The Gold Pool “pledged to refrain from converting their dollar exchange and sold gold out of their reserves in an effort to relieve the pressure on the United States” (Eichengreen 1992, 122).³¹ Later on, the Gold Pool even declared that it would neither buy nor sell gold above the $35 mark, using its now cartel-like powers to simply remove an enormous amount of demand away from gold suppliers (Bordo 1993, 174). To be clear, the Gold Pool was organized by many countries, all of which now had, strangely, a self-interest in not allowing the US gold hoard to move outside of America’s borders; put bluntly, they sacrificed their own gold to protect America’s temple hoard, in the plaintive hope that monetary stability would be delivered unto them.

At the same time, the US eliminated its own reserve requirement, which had long dictated that dollars could only circulate if 25 percent of their total was held in the gold reserve. Bordo helpfully explains that this demonetized gold “at the margin. The link between gold production and other market sources of gold and official reserves was cut” (1993, 174). Gradually, countries became increasingly wary that America was unwilling to defend its own gold peg. In the summer of 1971, France and the United Kingdom threatened to convert their reserve dollars into gold (Bordo 1993, 175). In yet another display of the sovereign exception, the US responded by closing the gold window. Simply refusing to honor its peg, the dollar now floated against gold; predictably, the US dollar inflated dramatically at this time, while gold retained its value. And yet “the United States was not compelled to reopen the gold window” (Eichengreen 1992, 131).³²

Our brief foray into Bretton Woods teaches us some very important things. First, despite its ultimate failure to deliver monetary stability, it finalized the safe, public sequestration of a chemical element from the periodic table. It closed the vault protecting the United States’ gold hoard and threw away the key. The window that allowed for its movement remains, for all intents and purposes, closed. Abandoning Bretton Woods provided America with the ultimate protection of its agglomerated inalienable possession, now truly decommodified.

Second, contrary to much political rhetoric, the gold standard epoch was never just a freewheeling market. As all scholars of these intricate systems of international monetary management show, they only functioned because of systemic and sustained intervention by public authorities. Most obviously, over several centuries, we witness various public authorities dictating prices to an international marketplace. Sometimes those public authorities even coordinate their actions with one another, making these dictates even more impressive. Sometimes the market carries the day and the price changes, but not before vast amounts of gold were sequestered in each period of price pegging. As such, the gold standard proves that communities can come together—at both the domestic and international levels—to guarantee a price for a sacred good. That price, in turn, then pushes the sacred good into a new gravitational field, eventually delivering it into a public hoard.

Third, such interventions need to be recognized as forms of collective sacrifice. For example, Eichengreen states that Britain, Switzerland, and all the members of the European Economic Community “contributed fully 40 percent of the gold sold on the London market” in an effort to protect America’s $35 per ounce promise (1995, 122; see also Bordo 1993, 174). At the same time, Bretton Woods also pressured the United States to agree to diminished export growth, in an effort to minimize disequilibrium in its trade balance (Eichengreen 1992, 102). In other words, here we have an international system that can inspire action today: many countries made transparent sacrifices in pursuit of the larger goal of monetary stability. Given this, it is bewildering that finalizing meaningful climate stability pacts seems to be so much harder.

With the end of Bretton Woods, we reach the end of the gold standard epoch for world currencies. Gold can now be bought and sold again by private citizens, and its value floats against the dollar (and other currencies) rather than being pegged. However, from our perspective, all of the intense labor that the gold standard epoch undertook has not been wasted—most of the gold remains in place, and central banks are not putting it on the market to be dispersed once again. Indeed, the reason why the United States closed its gold window was to keep the gold in place, to fight against markets (or other central banks) that wanted it to move again. That same sovereign power still keeps gold in place today, and it cannily prevents a reprise of the gold drains that were so standard for declining empires in the past. Someday, central banks may want to disperse their gold out into the marketplace, but it will be the result of a political decision (or the result of war pillage). For the time being, though, Bretton Woods remains a towering testimony to the collective, international, coordinated action that sucked gold out of the earth’s crust and brought it to a purified standstill.

SPIRITUAL TECHNOCRACY

A passionate spirit lay behind the drive for sound money, making it a relatively easy project of global technocratic coordination. There were conferences, there were panicked phone calls, there were market crashes, but ultimately, interested parties and powerful actors always found a pathway forward, despite their divergent interests. At the same time, that passionate spirit was an elite spirit, held by bankers and businesspeople; it was not really the daily concern of working people.

The passionate desire to fight catastrophic climate change, while perhaps still relatively elite, feels far more widespread than the fervor that dedicated itself to sound money for more than a century. Sound-money men were not defeatists in the least; in light of our own era’s endless global coordination failures, their accomplishments seem almost utopian. We must, therefore, take a cue from their insistent belief that this gargantuan project of global coordination can be achieved.

We are, however, still very much in the “pre-gold standard” phase of a carbon-backed currency. We cannot hope to suddenly leapfrog to a highly regulated international carbon-backed currency overnight, though many naysayers will likely use that as a cudgel against our aspirations. Thankfully, both technology and politics move much faster today than they did in 1850, so we can hope that it won’t take us an entire century.

We can begin, as did the gold standard, with local communities. As a carbon standard gains recognition and tensile strength, its currencies can spread, interrelate, and sometimes perhaps even combine into broader “currency unions.”³³ Perhaps, eventually, some governments might even seize monopoly control over issuance, as they have in the past, thereby guaranteeing a true, nationalized carbon hoard. But however it moves forward, proponents of a carbon-backed currency can take inspiration from the gold standard’s unintentional but incontestable by-product—the global sequestration of gold—while still being mindful of the many mistakes that occurred during its reign.

Proponents of a carbon-backed currency should also, of course, also be alert to the many tactics of monetary management that succeeded during the time of the gold standard. With this in mind, we will close our chapter on a note of hope, by circling back to a tried-and-true tactic of monetary management discussed above, which, like the gold standard, may have emerged from non-monetary underpinnings. To wit, for a carbon-backed currency, always threatened by “overabundance,” the extraordinarily common tactic of “sterilization” should be considered paramount.

As we learned, both the private Bank of Amsterdam and central banks have, in the past, sought to sterilize gold inflows whenever they were too abundant. That is, using either transparent or secretive methods, they simply sequester the gold but do not monetize it with new chits. As they do so, their hoard grows, but it does not threaten to inflate the money supply. In a carbon-backed system, a bank or even a central bank could simply agree to sweep away vast quantities of its solidified carbon whenever inflation loomed as a result of the potential abundance of carbon. Indeed, this could be intentionally planned and carried out in iterative phases.

Unlike the era of the gold standard, the sovereign owners of our proposed banks, held in common by their depositors, know their true purpose, which is to sequester carbon. So they would not be upset to hear that excess solid carbon was being eliminated from the central tally. Using the sovereign exception granted to it by its owners, the bank would “kill” a portion of its solid carbon hoard. Three tactics for doing so come to mind: First, it could do so by simply increasing the size of its vault without adding it to the balance sheet, as the Bank of Amsterdam did long ago. Second, it could sell its excess biochar for US dollars (or some other currency), and with that money, it could buy up fossil fuel deposits; because the bank would not want this as a liquid asset (because it would never want to sell it to someone who would drill), it would simply place title to such acquisitions in a charitable trust, never to be touched again.³⁴ Finally, it could also consider sterilizing excess biochar by creating new life, since it is a famed fertilizer. By spreading it, in the depths of a field, forest, or farm, without fanfare (because no one else can be allowed to find it and then monetize it), this abandoned portion of the collective hoard would then create a new, non-monetized eternity, off the books. Like all sacred hoards born of death, it would then create new life once again.

We are reminded of one of history’s most famous examples of gold sterilization, which is not typically considered part of the history of monetary policy. Vilar tells us, “When Tutankhamun’s tomb was opened in 1922, it contained twice as much gold as was held by the Egyptian Royal Bank at that time. In ancient times, a single find of this order could upset the whole gold market” (1984, 27). But the inverse must also be true—that permanently hiding away all that gold at the time of Tutankhamun’s death must have had some sort of deflationary impact on the Egyptian economy. Nevertheless, the leaders of Egypt decided to sweep all this gold off the market for eternity, in pursuit of some other inscrutable aim. In a powerful use of their sovereign exception, they sterilized a vast supply of economic value, sequestering it away and “taking it off the books” … forever. But Egypt continued to flourish for centuries after Tutankhamun’s death. Perhaps they grasped the true power of sacred hoards. We could learn from them too.

NOTES

1. This is by no means true, but because the United States has mostly cleansed its history of far earlier Spanish settlement, the so-called “49ers” are often considered the first wave that set in motion the settling of California by those of European descent.

2. Because this story repeats itself globally, we choose here not to refer to the victims of the California episode as Native Americans. Natives all over the planet have suffered this exact same fate, and we do not want to erase that. Migrant labor was also deeply exploited during the gold standard era, as brutally attested to in Ngai 2021.

3. There has always been a residual market in pragmatic or ornamental gold (see Bytheway and Metzler 2016), but it is not consequential enough to alter this story of global sequestration.

4. One scholar of hoarding, Alexander Sasha Newell, once pointed out to me that most piles have a tendency to grow. Once the stack of magazines has been established, more magazines land on it; once the drawer filled with miscellany has been chosen, all manner of extraneous items get placed there. Perhaps gold is simply following this same odd, seemingly phenomenological trajectory. If so, what is interesting is that these growing piles in our home are typically more trash than treasure, thus offering us one more example of the harmonic overlap between the two seemingly opposed categories. It is worth noting that American trash follows a cycle similar to gold during the era of the gold standard: beginning in small hoards in our homes, trash gets dispensed into larger hoards in trucks, which then deposit them at a giant municipal hoard of trash, where the trash should—just like Fort Knox—come to a permanent rest.

5. Gold’s seemingly gravitational forces were noticed by no less of a respected expert than Schumpeter (2011, 49). More recently, Anwar Shaikh (2016) also relies heavily on gravitational metaphors in his critically acclaimed Capital: Competition, Conflict, Crises.

6. We have used “reservoir” as an apt metaphor in other instances, but here we are simply trying to show how gold is attracted to larger and larger bodies of itself.

7. In an important essay on “Money’s Laws of Motion,” Scott Ferguson contests the idea that money has natural tendencies to move in specific “gravitropic” ways. But just as we disavowed that any of this was magical, we also disavow that any of it is “natural.” We are fascinated with how, through massive regulatory efforts and vast expenditures of labor, humankind has—in this epoch—made gold gravitropic. In some future epoch, it may simply scatter and never be reassembled. See Ferguson, “Money’s Laws of Motion,” Arcade (blog), May 9, 2017, https://shc.stanford.edu/arcade/interventions/moneys-laws-motion. See also Graeber 2010, Part II, which recounts the centripetal versus centrifugal movement of metal and paper, without placing it in this idiom (instead he describes how metal dissipates out to soldiers scattered across a territory governed by military authorities, whereas paper is attached to temple hoards governed by theological authorities).

8. Bankruptcy proceedings operate on a similar principle. In order for the debtor to be restored to solvency, the creditors can often be forced to agree to acquire a reduced percentage of what they had been originally promised, a so-called “haircut.”

9. This idea has been well established for over a century, often labeled “head taxes” by anthropologists who have studied imperial economies of extraction, but the idea has also been revivified recently by followers of Modern Monetary Theory. Regardless, a government issuing a token money only affirms our argument about power and inalienable possessions, for it creates the conditions for the international standard of value—the inalienable possession—to be driven into government-owned or government-regulated hoards, while this same government then offers domestic tokens in exchange for it.

10. This section relies heavily on Vilar 1984.

11. Consider, for example, a fanatic of a band who simply “must” have a ticket to a show. The scalper can sell tickets to this person at prices that seem far above market rates, making the trade seem like a swindle. And yet the scalper holds the ticket but simply does not value it more highly than money, whereas the reverse is the case for the fanatic. Such was perhaps the case with Columbus’s trades for gold upon arrival in the Caribbean. Not concerned with the global price of gold, the Natives perhaps believed they were getting the better end of the bargain.

12. Anna Tsing’s book Friction (2005) recounts a modern-day version of this same possibility that real alterations of the landscape can occur because of distant dreamers being captivated by chimeras.

13. These dark and morbid tales have been recounted by experts elsewhere (e.g., Hassig 1994; Gillespie 2008; Lamana 2008; Machemer 2020; and Seed 1991). Whether there was a binding agreement to release Atahualpa is disputed; regardless, Pizarro executed Atahualpa for alleged “crimes” while still seizing the ransomed gold.

14. In other words, the subsidies to carbon could come from at least two potential directions—either from governmental sources that would help in its provisioning even though it appeared uneconomical to bring it to market, or from individuals who freely give away their labor because they are dedicated to the cause (as in the Wikipedia model, explored in chapter 6).

15. Some ports tried to bypass Seville, creating other—illegal—entry points into Europe (Vilar 1984, 139–41).

16. Indeed, Keynes believed that the low interest rates that resulted from the flood of gold into Europe triggered the birth of capitalism itself (see Levy 2019, 184).

17. “Sterilizing” is an important tactic of monetary management, to be discussed further below.

18. Indeed, central banks cannot go bankrupt, which stands as supreme testimony to their sovereign power.

19. Of course, the gold can still slip out of the bounds of the nation-state; but this no longer happens through arbitrage, as was the typical fear, but instead through seizure and failed states. In 2021–2022, both Afghanistan and Russia serve as examples of states that have had their reserves seized—not as a result of a run on their central banks but simply by way of seizure by outside forces.

20. For an earlier critique concerning the gold standard as neo-mercantilism, see Cassel 1966, 256.

21. You can, for example, visit the Federal Reserve’s gold holdings in Lower Manhattan, where you will see that the United States still, to this day, holds some of France’s gold. For what it’s worth, this transferral of legal ownership without physical movement mimics the famous “stone money” of Yap (see Fitzpatrick 2019).

22. This was critiqued as its own sort of alchemy at the time (see Koen and van den Noord 2004, footnote 4).

23. The immense array of details regarding these developments have already been recounted by many experts, so here we only need to offer a general portrait (see, e.g., Balachandran 2015; Bloch 1995; Bytheway and Metzler 2016; de Cecco 1975; Eichengreen 1984 and 1992; Knafo 2013; Marcuzzo and Rosselli 1991; McCloskey and Zecher 1985; primary sources from the period itself are also helpful, e.g., Cassel 1932 and Keynes 1923, and even Fullarton 1844 and Marx 1992 for the period predating the true internationalization).

24. He uses this term of art.

25. The following section relies heavily on Knafo 2013, chapter 7.

26. As opposed to previous cessations of the gold standard, which were always viewed as mere “suspensions.”

27. One cannot help but wonder who paid the bill for this governmental transport—the US military or the private bankers?

28. Sovereign exceptions are typically latent but then become manifest during declared “states of emergency.” FDR’s gold maneuvers perfectly enact Schmitt’s theory.

29. The 1934 act had a provision that allowed non-monetary gold to continue its role in the marketplace. Jewelers and dentists, for example, still had ready access to gold for their legitimate needs.

30. Eichengreen explains in a footnote that the true Bretton Woods architecture only blossomed in full starting in January 1959 (2008, 112).

31. A unique IMF intra–central bank currency, so-called “Special Drawing Rights” (SDRs), was created at this time as well (Eichengreen 2008, 115–118). These SDRs also fit nicely with Weiner’s theory, in that Eichengreen details how they were created as an alternate chit to stop attacks on America’s gold reserves.

32. Gregory (1996) makes a trenchant critique that President Nixon employed this tactic as a way to offload the costs of the Vietnam War onto the global public instead of onto US finances.

33. While we cannot dwell on this in too much detail, it is worth pointing out that two formal currency unions evolved out of the gold standard: the Latin Monetary Union and the Scandinavian Monetary Union (see Cohen 1998). But, as is hopefully obvious by now, domestic currencies under the gold standard were also typically unions, in all but name, of a vast panoply of earlier, more local currencies.

34. Buying up legal title to sequestered carbon that has never been mined out of the ground is one of the most exciting tasks that a communally owned carbon-banking system could accomplish. However, because the sequestered carbon would have to be placed into a trust and could never be part of the “assets and liabilities” of a carbon bank, doing so is not quite a standard part of banking operations, and it is therefore not described in great detail in this book (though see Ferry n.d. for an example of an entrepreneur who hopes to attract gold aficionados to his plan to own part-title on a gold mine that will never be dug). Acquiring such title is more akin to the charitable work that for-profit banks do in their community, rather than a tactic for running the bank on a day-to-day basis. However, turning to it as a sterilization tactic seems both related and highly strategic.

4 THE BANKING COMMONS

I learned to notice remnants of past and partial commonwealths still at work around me.… These traces of commonwealth have begun to seem like a secret society, an inverted reality lurking inside what claims to be reality, economies that reject the rules by which the economy supposedly plays. In these traces, even tucked within competitive markets, cooperative advantage holds its ground. Each example pokes a hole in the usual story about how the world came to be as it is.

—Nathan Schneider, Everything for Everyone

COHESIVE CURRENCIES

Our first inkling that central banks—and the national currencies they manage—might harbor talismanic properties occurred in 1992, when the Swedish krona suffered a massive devaluation at the hands of “the market.” As the krona’s trading value was relentlessly questioned by the market for months, the Swedish Central Bank (the “Riksbank”) came to its valiant but pyrrhic defense, hopelessly trying to maintain its “peg” by continually ratcheting up the interest rate—at one point, all the way to a shocking and untenable 500 percent. During this raucous episode, desperate holders of kronas came rushing to the central bank coffers, trading their now less trustworthy kronas at discount for the more reliable foreign reserve holdings that sat immobilized in the Riksbank’s vault. Following our overall arguments, this episode represents a cataclysmic “explosion” of a sequestered inalienable possession. Sweden lost in a “tournament of value” (Appadurai 1986), and its sacred hoard was dispersed far and wide.

In more colloquial language, the world was witnessing a classic “bank run,” with people who held Riksbank liabilities (i.e., the krona) suddenly hoping to cash them in for the items that (partly) guaranteed their value. The country of Sweden lost immense amounts of economic value during those months, as the national treasury was drained of foreign currency and engorged with national currency. In her defense of governmental decisions at the time, then Finance Minister Anne Wibble disingenuously explained away these losses, stating, “It is not as if society has lost this money. We have it in Swedish kronas, whereas before we had it in foreign currency” (Hamilton and Rolander 1993, 73; see also Peebles 2004). Since 1992, the world has seen a vast array of runs on central banks, from the United Kingdom to Mexico to Argentina to Thailand (see Reinhardt and Rogoff 2011).

But for unknown—perhaps talismanic—reasons, such bank runs are referred to as “currency crises” rather than acknowledging that they precisely mimic traditional runs against private banks. It’s as though we cannot tolerate this affront to national pride, which sullies a nation’s reputation by revealing its currency to be a mere paper promise, issued and guaranteed by a central bank that might not be as august and upstanding as everyone had previously believed.

In each currency crisis we have witnessed since Sweden’s, the national media of the afflicted country sets off to find a scapegoat. Sometimes it devolves into the ugliest of conspiracy theories (just ask George Soros), but it never fails to train its ire at … foreigners: it must have been foreigners who brazenly questioned the trustworthiness of our central bank; it must have been nonlocals who had no true investment in the nation’s economic health; it must have been outsiders who raided our vault. People inside the markets who witnessed the actual trading quickly retort that none of this is true—locals abandoned the national medium of exchange as quickly as everyone else. Just as in private-bank runs, no one wants to be left “holding the bag”; but somehow this provincial trope and its underlying sentiment always emerges during currency crises. Notably, private-bank runs do not seem to produce similar rhetoric, which instead tends to focus on the malfeasance or negligence of the private bank’s internal hierarchy and management.

How could currency, this seemingly neutral device for quotidian trading and planning for the future, garner such vitriol from the citizenry and breathless coverage from the media, and why would it consistently be leveled at supposed outsiders? We will propose here that we witness such jingoistic defenses of currency because attacks on the currency are perceived as attacks on something inside a national commons; as a commons, national currencies have metaphysical powers that reach beyond their mere economistic powers, just as Weiner argues is the case for inalienable possessions (Weiner 1992; see also Brantlinger 1996). If true, the reasons people rise up against these attacks become more obvious, much as populations the world over have responded to the privatization of their communal property, owned and governed in a local commons (e.g., Federici 2004; Linebaugh 2014; Marx 1981; Thompson 1993).

With this perspective, we can here argue that currency crises are actually raids on what Ostrom (1989) christened “common-pool resources” (CPRs). In currency crises throughout the world, we witness time and again how private holders of currency (a type of banknote) proclaim that they no longer want to hold these representative units of the communal reserves; they rush to trade it, to seize a portion of the pooled resource and privatize it, running away with this newly privatized value and leaving the commons diminished. In previously holding the banknote, the holder had agreed to trust this commons and its management by a central bank; by trading it in for the immobilized value that sat in a communal hoard, the holder—whether for nefarious or sound reasons—has abandoned that same commons.¹ If the national currencies that we are all so thoroughly familiar with are already inside a commons, then it is less of a stretch to propose a new banking commons centered around carbon.

Such a claim is not so much idiosyncratic as it is simply underexplored. Here we will mostly be telling an uncontroversial story about the development of so-called nationally regulated forms of “fractional reserve banking,” but for whatever reason, scholars have not been particularly interested in the ownership structures of the central banks that emerged out of that development. Somehow not caring about this part of the story would fit, of course, with our earlier arguments that things inside the commons often “disappear” from people’s minds. Regardless, we take heart that Paul Tucker, who spent his entire career inside the Bank of England, offers the same provocative view, when he explains that “central banks are suppliers of a public good and preservers of a common good, entailing distinct kinds of intervention in the economy” (2018, 59).² In his book Unelected Power, he extensively discusses central banks’ roles as both “guardians” and “trustees,” thereby aligning himself with standard modes of commons’ governance structures.

To tell this counterintuitive story of how many countries have built giant, financial “commons” in the very heart of their economies, we will detail how centralized reserves (which guarantee the value of circulating currencies) have been built—and challenged—over time. Effectively, in all of these countries, we witness—much like we saw with gold in chapter 3—the gradual migration of personal hoards (often proverbially stored in “mattresses”) into larger and larger public hoards. In this sense, building national currency systems is akin to “nationalizing the mattress.” For various reasons, generations before us have, over time, agreed to attach their personal inalienable possessions to larger ones, and in the process they have gradually built a giant, national commons that can be protected by the state—but which can, as with Sweden in 1992, be raided and depleted just like a standard commons. Having migrated into a space of public management, these giant hoards can also explode when “enemies” are at the gates, converting back into tinier spaces of private management.

As stewards of national currency, central banks must constantly navigate this tension-laden dialectic common to all commons, wherein the central object of value is either waxing or waning in size and power—sometimes private owners are choosing to add their item to the commons, and sometimes they are asking to withdraw it. Due to the way banking “best practices” have circled the globe over the last two centuries, this is a modular story that will necessarily rely on some broad brush strokes. Local variations are important, but they do not undermine the general thrust of this historical development; indeed, these variations affirm one of Ostrom’s central axioms, listed as the second governance principle in chapter 1, that all adapt and respond to local conditions, and there can be no “one-size-fits-all” solution.

Stewarding the growth and stability of these national reserves requires intricate cooperation and norm-following by a wide array of both public and private interests. As Ostrom insisted, “Many successful CPR institutions are rich mixtures of ‘private-like’ and ‘public-like’ institutions defying classifications in a sterile dichotomy” (1989, 14). Following a sort of gravitational model, central banks stand as the sun in a national solar system of private banks and depositors, attracting or repelling new members—new commoners—every day. If we are correct in naming central banking systems as CPRs, it means that they sometimes serve the beating heart of rapacious capitalist states and need not be romanticized by the left; nor should they be hated by the right. Despite popular tendencies to the contrary, commons are not necessarily “anti-capitalist” nor are they necessarily “anti-state.” They are simply systems that are built over time to nurture and protect what a given community holds dear. By illuminating the strong and surprising overlaps between central banking and more typical commons, we will be in a far better position to explore how our proposed CPR banks, and their currencies, could function under a carbon standard.

CURRENCY AND THE COMMONS

“Hoard” has long been a charged word, raising the temperature of any straightforward assessment of accumulated economic value. But anthropologists know that the typical disparaging of hoards and hoarding is actually doing communal work: denouncing hoarders in some instances, while blithely failing to notice them in other instances, is a policing tactic that nurtures and sustains a given economic infrastructure.³

For example, we lament the poor soul who hoards newspapers, piling them in their home up so high that visitors can no longer enter. However, if a given city’s public administration fails to hoard all the newspapers published in its ambit, we deem them irresponsible. We celebrate these public hoards as civilized “archives,”⁴ whereas private hoarders of the same object are considered unhinged. Countless other examples beckon, all revealing that hoards help delineate group boundaries—the newspaper hoarder does not trust society enough to care for his precious newspapers, attesting to his sense of alienation from society. Contrariwise, by nurturing a community newspaper archive, we all agree (without even really ever thinking about it) to spend conjointly to help preserve our shared history.

Here we begin to see some of the hoard’s talismanic powers, which can “magically” activate a strong sense of community around it but also instill an intensely protective desire to stand watch over the given object that is accumulated. Unjustly labeled “greedy” or “irrational,” much hoarding behavior worldwide is eminently rational, and—as in the case of national currencies—it can even be eminently social. Indeed, the rush to abandon the national hoard that we witness in currency crises is more fairly labeled “greedy” than the original desire of the citizenry to hoard the valued object in the first place.⁵

Part of the hoard’s magic resides in the tendrils and tethers that radiate from it. In currency systems, these tendrils and tethers are partly just cash and deposit holdings, i.e., the assets that “members” of the CPR claim as part of this vast commons. Circulating currency, as a liquid asset for these members, is also a liability from the perspective of the CPR; as such, currency symbolizes a dyadic credit/debt relationship between the holder of the banknote and the communal owner of the hoard. Yet, as will become clear below, the CPR is itself constituted by the pooled assets of these same currency holders. Cash (currency), in other words, emanates out of this CPR, allowing all people who trust the CPR’s promises to go about their daily business of trading and planning for the future (see, e.g., Ingham 2004). Hoards are often accused of being “dead” or “sterile,” but in the case of currency, they are fertile in the extreme, giving birth to the entire currency system.⁶

Regardless of one’s stance on capitalist economies, this makes national currencies akin to many typical CPRs (as opposed to public goods). As Ostrom tells us, commons organized as CPRs are both non-excludable and rivalrous, whereas public goods are characterized by being both non-excludable and non-rivalrous. Non-excludability triggers the infamous “free-rider” problem (e.g., a free highway that becomes too congested to use because even people who are not contributing funds for its upkeep can access it), while non-rivalrous means that one person’s enjoyment of the good does not detract from someone else’s enjoyment of it (e.g., a lantern that happens to grant others’ light without diminishing the light that the owner of the lantern needs from it). For any given good, thorny issues of excludability and rivalry can easily lead to “market failure” (i.e., no one can make a profit on them, so they disappear from the market), which then often pushes the good into commons or public-goods provisioning (e.g., Norton 2008). Because currencies are hard to exclude (central banks have trouble policing who gains access to their cash) and are typically distributed unequally (meaning that some people have more currency than others), countries have frequently found themselves feeling the need to step in to produce and control currencies that otherwise might fail.⁷ Having witnessed endless bank runs in the era of “free banking” and “private issuance,” governments the world over decided, by establishing a central bank, to offer a publicly owned monopoly on the issuance and control of currency, thereby nationalizing it (see, e.g., Archer and Moser-Boehm; Grossman 2010; Tucker 2018).⁸

Certainly, central banks and the currency systems that they safeguard are hard to romanticize. We are accustomed to stereotyping the commons as small zones of warmth, empathy, and community that are always under attack. But what if the talismanic powers of central-bank hoards emerge from their unacknowledged representation of a giant community, of an idiosyncratic blend of the public and the private, of an ability to draw together an otherwise scattered and solipsistic citizenry into one community of conjoined interest? If so, we would do well to name them as a commons and then to carefully consider them as a potential model for building a carbon-banking system outside the grasp of the world’s all-too-many do-nothing governments. In investigating how these commons are nurtured, we might also learn if they can be constructed and managed more fairly.

BUILDING THE HOARD

Scholars have long documented the destruction of the commons; we know all too well how examples of various commons have been broken up and privatized in many countries and over many epochs. We even have good data on how commons are sustained. But we are less familiar with stories that recount the building of a commons—of how objects that had been private and lay firmly outside of the commons have become circumscribed and regulated within it.⁹

In her magisterial book Caliban and the Witch, Federici (2004) details the horrors of the destruction of the commons in Middle Ages Europe, and especially its brutal impact on women. The first part of this story is fairly well known, but Federici shocks us by pointing out that, as the land of this commons was being decimated, the private bodies of women were being lashed into a new commons, where their bodies were no longer their own to control and the community could harvest their labor without consent or remuneration. Taking inspiration from Federici’s insight that the destruction of one commons might entail the building of another, we would like to probe the possibility that, just as the infamous nineteenth-century land enclosure movement was causing the vast privatization of land, monetary theorists and bankers were gradually building a new banking commons that pushed private hoards into giant, collectively managed ones.

Grasping the history of the banking commons requires that we imagine daily life without access to banking services. “The Father of Savings Banks,” Scottish pastor Henry Duncan, observed that his impoverished congregants in Scotland were, in today’s terms, “financially excluded.” In his day (the early 1800s), a deposit account was a privilege reserved for the relatively wealthy, and the lion’s share of the British citizenry had no formal bank account (Horne 1947). Duncan set about to democratize banking, for he believed that it could provide countless financial and moral benefits to his charges. Duncan’s ceaseless efforts were pivotal in the expansion of the savings and deposit banks described in this chapter.

For the story we are trying to tell here, it is important to know that he recruited local philanthropists who would subsidize various aspects of banking, since they saw it as a “civilizing mission” of lifting up the British poor. Indeed, Pressnell tells us, “The idea of savings banks … [were] guaranteed and largely conducted by voluntary trustees and managers” (1956, 12). Once the system was up and running, the need for this philanthropy gradually disappeared, but the “kickstart” it provided was essential in changing the attitude of the multitudes who did not trust, or were unattuned to the potential benefits of, banking.

Beyond this philanthropy, Duncan’s crusade hinged on the many perils of holding a private hoard at home. He wrote,

Those who know anything of the situation and habits of the lower orders will readily be aware of the temptations and discouragements to which such a plan [to hoard] is necessarily subjected.… The temptation to break in upon the little stock on every emergency might be too strong to resist. At all events, the progressive addition of interest would be lost during the period of accumulation.… A similar effect must have resulted from the frequent instances which occur of the failure or knavery of those adventurers to whose hands the unwary are induced. (quoted in Horne 1947, 42–43; see also Duncan 1816)

Caring for a private hoard requires expertise and diligence, neither of which Duncan expected of his flock. Further, private hoards were hard to protect not only from lurking thieves and other assorted “knaves” but even from family members who would invariably catch wind of its existence and plead with the owner to share it. Duncan also avers (along with countless other advocates of financial inclusion through the ages) that a given amount of money accrues no interest while hidden in a mattress. But once it has attached itself to the larger bank hoard, it can steadily increase in value, seemingly magically and just as we would expect out of a fecund inalienable possession.

Tellingly, the interest rate, while castigated for centuries by various sectors of the political spectrum, actually reflects the same “usufruct” (use-of-the-fruits) principle of property that governs natural-resource commons the world over. As described in the literature, most natural-resource commons see “fee-simple” ownership as anathema to their functioning. Instead, all users of these commons have “use rights” over communal property. This means that they can graze, harvest, and gather, whereas fee-simple control over land allows them to do all those things but also to exclude others from doing the same (e.g., Standing 2019, 30). An interest rate sets a price on the temporary use of a communal hoard and fluctuates depending on how safe the hoard is deemed to be at the moment that the usage of the capital is granted. Importantly, it also reflects our argument that bank reserves are CPRs rather than public goods, because not every member can come to the bank at the same time and ask for a loan; that is, one member’s acquisition of a loan impinges on the potential likelihood of another member also acquiring a loan.

Usufruct rights entail that a member of a commons should only take “as much as they need”—any more than that is a private seizure of the commons’ bounty, either for private profit-seeking (i.e., unjust resale, thus gaining individual profit off of a communally owned resource) or for sterile private hoarding. The way in which all commons share an ideology against “sterile hoarding” stands as yet more evidence that we are speaking of fecund inalienable possessions—it is “in the nature of commons” to be generative and to provide for the community, so the system often builds both legal safeguards and community ethics to stop anyone from killing that shared magic generativity by harvesting too much for themselves.

Because usufruct rights, while standard in commons the world over, nevertheless remain obscure to many, it is worth offering an extended quote from Kimmerer, whose book is suffused with the ethos of usufruct rights. She recounts one particularly instructive instance:

I once met an engineering student visiting from Europe who told me excitedly about going ricing in Minnesota with his friend’s Ojibwe family. He was eager to experience a bit of Native American culture. They were on the lake by dawn and all day long they poled through the rice beds, knocking the ripe seed into the canoe. “It didn’t take long to collect quite a bit,” he reported, “but it’s not very efficient. At least half of the rice just falls in the water and they didn’t seem to care. It’s wasted.” As a gesture of thanks to his hosts, a traditional ricing family, he offered to design a grain capture system that could be attached to the gunwales of their canoes. He sketched it out for them, showing how his technique could get 85 percent more rice. His hosts listened respectfully, then said, “Yes, we could get more that way. But it’s got to seed itself for next year. And what we leave behind is not wasted. You know, we’re not the only ones who like rice. Do you think the ducks would stop here if we took it all?” Our teachings tell us to never take more than half. (Kimmerer 2013, 181–182)

This example of usufruct is particularly powerful, for it is clear that these Ojibwe see their CPR as including nonhuman members (e.g., ducks), whose needs must also be considered. The rice “gives” each year, but not only to this one family. The bounty must be regenerated, by leaving some behind, but so too must others be able to find the bounty when it is their turn to harvest. Like tithing and other mission-driven economic practices, here we witness a system in which people willingly part with potential economic value that could be theirs, and they intentionally deny themselves so that the system at large can survive too.

To take another example: Any Swede will tell you that there is a supposedly “untranslatable” word in their language, “lagom,” that perfectly encapsulates much of their national culture. “Lagom” means “just about right, no more, no less,” a sort of Goldilocks principle. The “folk etymology” of the word derives from this same principle from the commons, insisting that the word comes from “Laget om,” which means “around the team.”¹⁰ Upon receiving a pot of stew from your neighbor at the dinner table, “lagom” counsels you to “take as much as you need, but not so much that there will not be enough left for the bowl to circulate throughout the entire team (or group).” In order to consume individually, the ethics of “lagom” means that you must also be thinking about others as you dip your ladle into that stew—a clear example of usufruct rights in action.

Pre-fiat deposit banking operated on the principle that as much underutilized money as possible should be shared, just as a natural-resource commons hopes for its bounty to be cyclically used rather than hoarded.¹¹ By building a collectivized hoard, banks can “magically” transform sterile money into fecund money. Via the interest rate, one member of a deposit institution can acquire usufruct rights over a portion of a communal hoard whenever it is sitting idly. A borrower cannot ask for so much capital as to kill the hoard (unless the bank makes poor lending decisions); in fact, in repaying the loan, they are (assuming all goes well) restoring their temporary “grazing” on the conjoined capital to its status quo ante. The interest rate, in other words, enforces a sense of “lagom” upon the borrower, encouraging them to take only precisely as much as they absolutely need and no more. Additionally clarifying this comparison between standard commons and banking commons, Keynes believed that money’s interest rate is determined by the “liquidity preference”; for him, the interest rate governed the individual choice between private hoarding versus linking up with a communal deposit institution (Keynes 1997; see also Levy 2019). Keynes’s insight clarifies why money in a mattress is viewed as a selfish hoard, whereas money placed in a deposit bank functions as a communal sharing tactic.

Seen from this angle, we can see that the spread of deposit banking is, surprisingly, the inverse of enclosure. What had been deemed a fiercely privatized good—precious personal savings—is being pushed into a new commons. In the process, both the individual and the community see material gains¹² while they also give up certain rights. The many bank runs of the nineteenth century (and since) all affirm that depositors were willingly relinquishing fee-simple (exclusive) control over their private savings, allowing them to instead enter into a commons with new rights held by the group. During a bank run, the private depositor becomes jarringly aware that the money they believed was firmly their own also had countless other claimants upon it. Had they kept it in the mattress, they would have had no cause for concern as a financial panic gripped their neighborhood bank. Having joined the emergent banking commons for its many benefits, they also learned of its attendant costs.¹³

Further affirming our argument, it is also worth highlighting that bank runs represent the standard “tragedy of the commons” but played out at an accelerated speed. As depositors awaken to the possibility that the communal hoard may not be as extensive as they had believed, they all rush to reacquire what they had stored for safekeeping at the bank. If they still trusted the banking commons, the communal hoard would live another day, but once the trust has evaporated, each depositor fears that they will be the only one who will lose their private portion of the communal hoard. As a result of this “herd mentality,” private hoards blossom once again as the communal hoard is raided and depleted, much as a commons can be, if the bonds of social trust breakdown.

But there is far more to this tale of the “commoning”¹⁴ of individual private hoards into larger and larger communal hoards, watched over (for better or worse) by private deposit banks. As countless private hoards have moved centripetally toward one another in each country that has witnessed the spread of deposit banking, the nation itself has also benefitted materially (see statistics in chapter 3). For example, Davies tells us that, in the UK case, “working-class savings supplied a steadily rising rivulet into the lake of City liquidity,” which London bankers then used to power the immense growth of British industry at the time (2002, 339).¹⁵

Be that as it may, these deposit bank hoards gradually were collectivized at yet a higher level still—into the national central banks. In the era prior to the nationalization of currency, private banks could hold a communal reserve, stored safely in a vault, while allowing their depositors and borrowers to walk the streets with paper liabilities representing the same reserve. For reasons too extensive to be detailed here, this led to the endemic bank runs of the nineteenth century. In an attempt to solve this damaging pattern, national and international debates ensued about how to control and regulate national currency supplies, focusing largely on how to convert these countless unreliable private-bank currencies into one reliable public currency (see, e.g., Helleiner 2003).

As recounted in chapter 3, the well-known economist John Fullarton explained how, as a result of a series of legislative reforms and evolution of banking practices, the Bank of England gradually became the national hoard (with private-bank reserves as mere “satellite” hoards, ultimately controlled by the Bank of England), agglomerating unto itself all the private hoards that had previously been hiding in mattresses across the land (1844, 72). In describing this episode with his characteristic acerbic wit, Marx simultaneously confirms that we are not alone in seeing that “banking reserves” and “hoards” are one and the same thing: “[T]he sanctity and inviolability of the reserve is thereby carried much farther than among the hoarders of old” (1992, 696). This agglomerated national hoard then also regulated the currency supply, as the Bank of England (like other central banks after it) gradually attained monopoly control over currency issuance. Given this, perhaps it is time to recognize that the national hoard—places like Fort Knox—may be a fecund commons, regulated by non-profit stewards,¹⁶ rather than for-profit CEOs.

OWNING THE HOARD

Citizens of many nations are so accustomed to perceiving their own personal bank accounts as private that it can be hard to countenance the idea that the very root of the system might be communally owned. In their administrative structure, central banks are intended to be bankers to the private banks, rather than having direct customer-based lines to individual citizens. Because central banks have no daily contact—or rather, no transparent daily contact—with citizens, the banks are perceived as being at a stratospheric remove from daily life. Consequently, many people are unaware of their own role in building and sustaining the national currency system.

Indeed, how many people even bother to ascertain who, in the legal sense, owns the central banks’ reserves that backstop the currency they hold? The academic literature dedicated to the topic is quite scant outside of a subset of monetary economists and legal writers (see, e.g., Ricks 2016; Spolaore 2020; Tucker 2018). Typically, known hoards have identifiable owners, but it would seem that few people ponder who owns the gargantuan reserves-cum-hoards held by central banks.¹⁷ As recounted above, public rhetoric during currency crises—the breakdown of the central bank system—provides us with a hint that “the people” of a given nation dimly sense that these reserves are rightly theirs—part of a national patrimony. All the same, just like other commons, individual holders of currency cannot expect to walk into the central bank and redeem the banknote for a representative portion of the centralized hoard.

Complicating matters still more, it can be hard to disentangle the private reserves of citizens, private banks, and central banks. Rather, they are in a nested relationship of trust and mutual “ownership” that can grant a rabbit-hole quality to the entire machine. Citizens keep their money in private deposit accounts at a local bank, and these citizens’ accounts are then pooled by the local bank; the local banks then keep deposit accounts at the central bank, and these banks’ accounts are then pooled by the central bank. At each level of the system, specific amounts of these pooled savings should be—ideally—hived off as “reserves” and kept from circulation, precisely to guarantee the specific aliquot portions held by the now conjoined “owners” of all the collectivized deposits. Seemingly throwing up its hands in the face of this welter of nested claims, no less an institution than the US Federal Reserve affirms the confusion by announcing on its FAQ page that “The Federal Reserve System is not ‘owned’ by anyone” (US Federal Reserve n.d.).

As with all effective public goods and CPR infrastructure, central banks should mostly chug along in the background, doing their boring and mundane labor while the rest of us skate along on their fluid operation—much as we fail to notice the intense daily maintenance that goes into operating a highway bridge until it collapses (see, e.g., Elyachar 2010, 455). Much to their chagrin, central bankers’ daily work has become more common knowledge, precisely because of the seemingly endless crises of the recent past, from the European crises of 1992 to the Asian crisis of the late 90s to the 2008 financial crisis and now to COVID-19. Novel techniques to push and pull the economy have emerged, and central-bank chiefs have become household names. Still, arcane language and complex operations keep many of us from prying too deeply into central-bank administration. Like the aforementioned highway bridge, many of us find ourselves simply assuming trust in our central bank, for it may be too cumbersome and futile to dig any deeper (see Giddens 2013; Luhmann 2017).

As with any Ostromian Commons, we have contracted¹⁸ the governance of these robust and complicated systems to local experts, all hailing from multiple locations within the nested system. Central bankers, treasury officials, and private-sector actors carry on fine-tuned discussions every day about how best to sustain and nurture the system. Both quotidian and radical challenges to the monetary system are addressed in consultation, listening to groups “on the ground” who are witnessing the ebb and flow of money at various points along the chain (personal communications; Bruner and Carr 2007; Cohan 2008; Hamilton and Rolander 1993; Ingham 2004; Stigum 2007); different countries have different traditions of how competitive versus cooperative these consultations can be, but no country refuses to have these conversations at all. Aside from being “nested at scale,” this also fits with Ostrom’s notion of “polycentric governance,” which her husband (also a well-known theorist of the commons) once described as “many centers of decision making that are formally independent … [which can] enter into various contractual and cooperative undertakings or have recourse to central mechanisms to resolve conflicts” even when they are in seemingly competitive relationships (Ostrom, Tiebout, and Warren 1961, 831).

Just as Ostrom’s model would suggest, naming such a system as either “state” or “market” becomes somewhat nonsensical.¹⁹ Rather, a mutually reinforcing set of private and public operators—running from individual to central bank—all thrive off of and nurture this vast infrastructure. Ostrom herself hinted at all of this when she bluntly insisted that “no market can exist for long without underlying public institutions to support it. In field settings, public and private institutions frequently are intermeshed and depend on one another, rather than existing in isolated worlds” (1990, 15).

One of the best analogies for understanding all this leads us straight back to Ostrom. As she describes, across the world people band together—with or without state aid is no matter—to build reservoirs, which are designed to steady the flow of water rather than subject society to its seasonal whims. Simultaneously, individuals who benefit off of this newly controlled flow learn—during crises—that they are often not permitted to divert water as a private good; that is, the water that falls on their own plot of land and helps them thrive also has public claims upon it (see Healy 2015; Ostrom 1989). Prior to the building of the reservoir, they could consider rainfall on their own property as manna from heaven for their own use, but now they must recognize that they play a role in sustaining the collective good. As Ostrom tells us, “The resource units, however, are not subject to joint use or appropriation.… The water spread on one farmer’s fields cannot be spread onto someone else’s fields. Thus, the resource units are not jointly used, but the resource system is subject to joint use” (1990, 31; emphasis ours). This is precisely the situation with private depositors and private banks vis-à-vis central banking systems. The money they seek to use is manifestly “theirs,” but the system that regulates its flow and storage is not theirs but is nevertheless sustained by their private usage.²⁰ As Douglas Holmes succinctly puts it, “the public broadly must be recruited to collaborate with central banks in achieving the ends of monetary policy” (2014, 1).

Fascinatingly, even when statute clarifies exactly who owns a central bank (e.g., Italy, or the regional Federal Reserve Banks of the American system), it is not classic fee-simple ownership. Rather, ownership shares are typically not transferable but are instead considered a prerequisite to membership, just as with more standard cooperatives. More telling still, many central bank reserves are specifically not “marked to market” (Archer and Moser-Boehm 2013; Buiter 2008) and sometimes do not even have a market in which to sell, which also mimics the classic way in which items inside a commons cannot be sold and often cannot even be priced (see Standing 2019, 46).

Investigating the role of bankruptcy also confirms the odd status of central banks and their currency systems that we are trying to pin down here. In the world of private goods and markets, bankruptcy proceedings reliably clarify ownership over assets. Central banks, contrariwise, cannot go bankrupt (see Buiter 2008). Rather, hyperinflation and international currency crises govern “the bottom line” of central banks.²¹ In those instances, central banks’ status as being inside a commons becomes manifest, for the only people who lose are the holders of the central bank’s currency; that is, its circulating liability is the asset of the people who rely on the central bank system. Indeed, one well-known central banker has referred to inflation as “share dilution,” comparing the holding of cash to the holding of equity in a firm (see Andolfatto 2010 and 2020).

Finally, Ostrom’s system assumes that private actors will “appropriate” the fruit of the commons. Sounding very much like the system of leveraged reserves that governs central banking, she writes that

resource systems are best thought of as stock variables that are capable, under favorable conditions, of producing a maximum quantity of a flow variable without harming the stock or the resource system itself.… I call the process of withdrawing resource units from a resource system “appropriation.” Those who withdraw such units are called “appropriators.” (Ostrom 1990, 30)

In a currency system managed by a central bank, there is no scandal in gleaning from the commons. The economy is supposed to generate more and more growth, and appropriators expect to get their share of it. The scandal, instead, is in gleaning overmuch from the commons, depleting the central reserve and the system it sustains, just as we saw in the currency crises described earlier.

In his book Plunder of the Commons, Guy Standing divides governance and use of the commons into three groups: stewards, gatekeepers, and commoners.²² Stewards are the “titular owners … expected to uphold [the commons’] integrity on behalf of the commoners.” Gatekeepers are “vital for the commons, as monitors tracking what happens and as intermediaries negotiating between commoners, property owners, and those seeking to commodify the commons” (Standing 2019, 50–51). Finally, commoners are “all those who have access to the commons, who rely on them for their livelihood or way of living, and who participate in the governance, preservation and reproduction of a commons” (Standing 2019, 29). This nicely describes the management of national currency systems as well—the central bankers are the stewards, the private banks are the gatekeepers, and the currency holders are the commoners. It seems especially important to note that central bank chairpeople never receive remuneration even remotely similar to the remuneration of the private-bank chairpeople. Though they preside over the operation of everyone else’s ability to profit—and even profit at potentially grotesque levels—they themselves are not expected to profit off their stewardship.

We can, of course, vociferously argue that there is not nearly enough input from the commoners themselves, and that national currencies are governed by an all too rarefied and wealthy assemblage of players; many alternative currency formations have been built upon precisely this critique. Further, the commercial bankers-cum-gatekeepers may abuse their access and thus too easily over-appropriate from the commons.²³ Finally, the system necessitates endless growth, which is also worthy of critique in this era of looming climate catastrophe. But those are all critiques of the governance of the banking commons; these critiques do not negate the idea that the central bank currency system is a commons. Users of currency—commoners—ignore the day-to-day governance of the currency until a raid on the public hoard occurs; this is perceived as an attempt to privatize that which is public—a repeat of enclosure tactics that are so well documented in the literature. Not surprisingly, we find that when this occurs, the commoners make their input heard quite well.

MAGIC OF THE HOARD

Commons generate so much friction not only because they are engines of economic growth for a given community, but also because they embody and symbolize the groups that collectively own them. Commoners are invested both financially and culturally in sustaining their commons. In this sense, commons are a communally owned value that must be held outside the sphere of profane market exchange, and guarded from it, even if the commons and its protected value supports a vast and intertwined private market that prospers around it.²⁴ Here it is worth reiterating how central-bank currency systems are manifestly not for sale, and that people would generally react in horror if they discovered that they were. Even a central bank with as sullied a recent history as Argentina’s cannot be imagined as something that could land on the auction block, even though its assembled assets would be attractive to many a buyer. And yet all the objects that circulate as a result of this “grounding” central-bank currency system are for sale, including the private banks that act as local experts within the system. Like all things held inside a commons, central banks are—ironically, we admit—themselves decommodified.

As mentioned extensively already, objects that cannot circulate inside a market can be referred to as “inalienable possessions,” following the arguments made by Annette Weiner in her landmark text of the same name. Weiner carefully cataloged a range of such objects, across the world in both time and space, and claimed that the category existed as a “human universal” (1992, 154). Importantly, these objects have often previously circulated but then become decommodified as they become inalienable. At that moment, she explains, they acquire sacrality, while they are simultaneously credited with activating societal power, growth, and regeneration.

This returns us to the magic of the commons—how it can acquire generative powers “beyond its exchange value,” as Weiner would say. Central banks are often accused of magic when they conjure money “out of thin air.” Beyond this, central-bank reserves follow the standard logic of fertility that governs more typical commons, and central banks themselves are considered stewards of the growth of the economies over which they preside. In general, the power of money has often been lambasted as part of the “dark arts,” precisely because it is seen as inducing “unnatural” growth, but if we recognize that currency systems reside within the commons, then money’s generative powers may seem a bit less devilish.

Instead, just as with a typical grazing commons, central banks strive to maintain a stable currency through which commoners are allowed to build their own personal value, while the central-bank reserves represent the (ideally) untouchable “principle” that fructifies the broader economy.²⁵ Returning once again to our quote from Thomas Weguelin, the nineteenth-century governor of the Bank of England, we are reminded that “the reserve of bullion in the Bank of England is, in truth, the central reserve or hoard of treasure upon which the whole trade of the country is made to turn” (cited in Marx 1992, 633).

Central banks have additional magical powers that seem to derive from their sovereign status, standing simultaneously inside and outside the market. Aside from their inability to go bankrupt, central banks have two other important “sovereign exceptions” (see Schmitt 2006, also discussed in chapter 3). First, they are well known as the “lender of last resort.” Indeed, this is considered the pillar of their capacity to grant stability to the banking system, as described by Bagehot long ago in his benchmark study of the money market, Lombard Street (1910). Even though many central banks have fewer assets than some of the largest international private banks (Buiter 2008), there is effectively no limit (other than hyperinflation) that can limit their ability to lend to private banks in need. With merely the click of a keyboard, central banks can “explode their balance sheet” in ways that private banks cannot. In so doing, they take on the assets of failing institutions as collateral, injecting “base money,” that is, central bank–issued liabilities into the failing institution’s coffers. Doing so allows central banks not only to backstop failing institutions but also to magically transform the assets of a flailing bank into hard currency (Ricks 2016; Stigum and Crescenzi 2007).

Delineating yet another seemingly magical power, Mehrling (2011) argues that central banks today have become the “dealer of last resort.” As the 2008 crisis taught us, sometimes commercial banks have acquired items that, at least for some crucial time period, have no market at all. As “toxic” assets, they cannot be bought or sold—no one will touch them. In comes the central bank, which can offer a price for such unsellable goods and then store them in the national hoard. Society acquires these toxic assets, immobilizes them for a given period of time, and then can recirculate them again, once the market has recovered. Again, since the central bank can just “print money,” it can buy any asset it wants, seemingly without limits. Because it is the monopoly creator of cash, all private institutions will readily accept currency units (again, absent hyperinflation) in exchange for the toxic assets on their own balance sheets, even if those currency units were simply conjured out of thin air. No other entity in the economy can issue an almost limitless supply of IOUs. In a perfect display of Schmitt’s argument, such behavior is, in fact, considered fraudulent when practiced by others.

This capacity to abundantly call up new currency units at a moment’s notice is not only quasi-magical,²⁶ but it also reveals that the central bank is “outside of standard market exchange,” just like other commons. As a commons, it has acquired a sort of “sacredness” that grants it these fecund powers; these fecund powers, in turn, are what allow it to regulate the profane economy that it oversees. And so we learn that, while all other parties in the economy are famously governed by the iron law of scarcity, central banks are governed by the plastic law of abundance.

A CARBON HOARD

The wildly consequential and highly impressive spread and democratization of basic, everyday banking practices recounted in this chapter should be widely known as the “savings bank revolution,” but, somehow, it is not. Whether you agree or disagree with banking as a concept, in a relatively short period of time, the world witnessed the birth and growth of highly influential collective institutions designed to sequester precious objects. In the process, the money these institutions collectivized then catalyzed the Industrial Revolution. Perhaps in our own epoch, a new version (and hopefully a more ethical version, because of its place inside the commons) of this story could catalyze a desperately needed green revolution.

Despite not being well known, this story was covered by Marx, who carefully noted the migration of private hoards into public ones in his magnum opus, Capital. Indeed, the agglomeration of private hoards into “socialized” ones (as described in this chapter) stood as one of the empirical pieces of evidence he relied on to argue that capitalism necessarily led to socialism. As he explained, the evolving credit system he was witnessing in Fullarton’s nineteenth-century Britain represented the moment when countless “private capitals” become “social capital,” thereby causing the “abolition of capital as private property within the confines of the capitalist mode of production itself” (Marx 1992, 567). In stating this, Marx is pithily relating the extinction of fee-simple ownership over money in favor of usufruct.

At the same time, Marx shows how this process of building a new commons isn’t necessarily a cozy and peaceful one, and we might not even like the commons we get dragged into (see Federici 2004). The commons, in this sense, is “what you make of it.” They can be managed by people intent on domination or by people hellbent on better integrating the economy with nature (our project very much hopes for the latter). It is a neutral concept, and we would do well to not romanticize it, precisely so that we can guard against its dangers while benefiting from its many powers.²⁷

Regardless, the story of building a banking commons incontestably shows that doing so is not only possible but is even a fairly likely outcome, given how banks tend to evolve over time. Perhaps because of enduring suspicions of banking, we have forgotten this standardized and repetitive tale, and we instead often treat enclosure as a one-way street, with the world always heading toward more and more privatization. Instead, it may be better to think of enclosure and commoning as an ongoing dialectic, with new commons being built even while others are being destroyed. This fits better, after all, with the understanding that all commons must be “living organisms,” capable of nimbly responding to ever-changing socioeconomic and ecological circumstances.

All this strongly suggests that, should we put our minds to it, we should be able to drive solid carbon into a Carbon Commons, managed by diligent stewards and gatekeepers, and used every day by ecologically-minded commoners. If, given the climate catastrophe we are living through, we are deeply frustrated with our banking systems’ failure to sustain us as a typical commons must, we should use this history to build a carbon-banking system, governed in a more democratic and more sustainable commons. One expert on the commons, Bollier, justifies this hope when he tells us, “by naming the commons, we can learn how to reclaim it” (2014, 3). Such a Carbon Commons would not only be protected from the predations of the governments and private corporations that are barely acting to even mitigate climate change, but it would also actively compete against them, offering a crucial CPR infrastructure to the businesses and individuals who do hope to build an economy that is not at odds with our survival on the planet.

NOTES

1. Nineteenth-century economists, including Marx, used “hoard” and “reserve” interchangeably in their writings. We are revivifying the archaic usage because it better hints at their metaphysical powers.

2. Importantly, he is pointing out that they cannot quite be managed along the standard lines of public goods management, but rather, they fall more into the category of CPR management, where the good is non-exclusionary but rivalrous.

3. Elyachar (2010) has helpfully named the seeming chitchat that can build and sustain public infrastructure “phatic labor.”

4. To be clear, all manner of archival material is rarely if ever accessed. These are expensive hoards. While once doing research in the judicial archive of Malmö, Sweden, Peebles found himself going through boxes from the 1820s that had never been opened since the day the court stenographer placed them in the box. (Due to the wetness of ink, stenographers of that time would sprinkle grains of sand after putting down each piece of paper, so as to keep the ink from bleeding onto other pages. If sand scatters when you lift up a page, it means that it has not been touched since the day it was stored.)

5. See Peebles 2020 for a review of anthropological work on hoarding. Also see Newell 2023.

6. In rare instances, a currency can function without a centralized hoard that backs it (e.g., bitcoin), but this is the exception rather than the rule. Even in such cases, something more metaphysical must undergird the circulating currency’s value, such as trust in the community. If there is no immobilized and stable value that the circulating currency represents, the latter will have no value itself. We cover this in more detail in chapter 2.

7. Famous economists such as Hayek (1976) have argued that private currencies fail for other reasons (precisely because of governmental intervention), but this does not change the historical evolution of central banks taking increasing control over currency.

8. Recent books by Desan (2014), Pettifor (2018), and Pistor (2020) all helpfully insist on the public’s power in the monetary system, pushing against decades of “monetarism” that had relegated this power to the market.

9. There is, of course, a literature on decommodification via state action, but there is a good deal less about this decommodification occurring via the commons.

10. The folk etymology is apparently incorrect, and yet it is the one that gets repeated by everyone when describing the concept behind the word.

11. The era of fiat money has complicated this, but nevertheless, today all customers’ deposits are still assembled in a giant pool, and this impacts the amount of money that the bank can loan out, even if it is far from the only controlling variable.

12. But we reserve judgment on whether they have benefitted spiritually. Many of the critiques of capitalism rest on this distinction: not questioning the material bounty that it can produce for given individuals, but instead contesting the damage it can do to both individual and community spirit and well-being.

13. This story is, incidentally, repeating itself once again today, with the advent and spread of microfinance, which is the spear-tip of the same effort toward financial inclusion that pastor Duncan advocated long ago.

14. See Standing (2019, 27–28) on revivifying “common” as a verb.

15. Lest this sound like a provincial story from Britain, Duncan’s effort to democratize banking access for the masses stood as an inspiration to reformers across much of the nineteenth-century world (Horne 1947, 52).

16. This is not to suggest, of course, that these stewards do not monetize their connection to the public hoard in other ways, as the controversy over US Federal Reserve Chairwoman Janet Yellen’s speaking fees attests (see Makortoff 2021).

17. Here we ignore the predictable range of fringe conspiracy theorists who traverse dark corners of the blogosphere.

18. This is an important term of art. One of the reasons that libertarian “free bankers” are so excited to eliminate the central-bank system is that they believe that regular depositors would suddenly awaken and then maintain more vigilant surveillance over their own depository institutions; free bankers believe that the current system causes us to too easily let our banks engage in nefarious and irresponsible behavior, and that the centralized system creates the conditions for rife “moral hazard” by causing regular depositors to not care how responsible or irresponsible their own bank may be. Either way, their stance illuminates the fact that, in becoming banked, we are implicitly agreeing to a wider contract with the central-bank system that governs our local bank.

19. The US Federal Reserve System makes this eminently clear by having sui generis status both inside and outside the government, and, as the Fed itself clarifies, it “is not ‘owned’ by anyone” (Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, “Who Owns the Federal Reserve?”, accessed August 21, 2024, https://www.federalreserve.gov/faqs/about_14986.htm). We find it also quite suggestive that the US Federal Reserve System was founded as a dispersed unity of “regional” reserve banks specifically sensitive to America’s farm economy and built at the height of the global cooperative movement’s popularity, when the United States was witnessing an explosion of cooperativist “granges” (Grossman 2010; Schneiberg, King, and Smith 2008).

20. For centuries, writers have compared the flow of money to the flow of water; just as a society can experience droughts and floods, so too can there be a scarcity or abundance of money.

21. Noting this constraint has become a central pillar of the newly emergent Modern Monetary Theory (see e.g., Kelton 2020; Wray 2012).

22. Standing also mentions “custodians,” but these are people who only step in once the commons has already been attacked and may already have been privatized. As such, they are irrelevant for our purposes, though they may have significance in a coming age of increasingly privatized digital cash.

23. The potential to create CBDCs (central bank digital currencies, as explored in chapter 7) are, in fact, threatening the copious profits that private banks have been gleaning from their position within the central banking system (see Peebles 2020).

24. For example, a fish-filled lake can be owned and regulated as a commons. In conjunction with this system, the fishermen “appropriate” fish (in Ostrom’s language) and then sell it privately at the market.

25. Having the power to fructify has often been associated with magic (Peebles 2012), so we should not be surprised that central banks have an aura of sacrality to them, and we should no longer wonder why they are all built to resemble churches and other temples.

26. Recall not only that much early monetary theory was inspired by alchemy but also that Sir Isaac Newton was both warden of the Mint and a student of alchemy (see Newman 2018; Wennerlind 2011).

27. Here we part ways with many proponents of the commons who see it as a pathway to a postcapitalist world (e.g., Dardot and Laval 2019; Giuliani and Vercellone 2019; Hardt and Negri 2011). We acknowledge that the commons is certainly always “in competition with” capitalist structures, but there is also a great deal of evidence that they work in symbiosis (see Raworth 2017). This fits with our mystical bent, since most strains of mysticism believe that the universe is comprised of oppositional forces—yings and yangs. In this sense, we firmly believe that the commons “is not a utopia” (Wall 2017, 177) and that, at least for the crucial task of sequestering carbon, we need not additionally task a commons banking system with revolutionizing the world order along the way.

5 THE SKY-MINERS’ REBELLION

We can only overcome our fear of a future that we are anxious about with an image of a future that we want.

—Founder of Germany’s GLS Bank, cited in Just Money: Mission-Driven Banks and the Future of Finance, by Katrin Kaufer and Lillian Steponaitis

CARBON CORRESPONDENCES

If carbon is one of the many currencies of nature, circulating in and out of various entities that rely on its exchange (see chapter 1), we can infer that there must be vast reserves of “hard,” stabilized carbon that support this more daily liquid movement and trade. Just as most currencies throughout human history have been constituted by a dialectical relationship between a stable/concrete and a flowing/abstract element, our analogy—or Swedenborgian correspondence—would suggest that nature’s currency would need to live by the same systemic constraints.

And so we find, hidden in deep and hard-to-access “vaults,” vast reserves of carbon, such as fossil fuel and limestone deposits. For millennia, they sat untouched by humankind, merely accruing—over cosmic time intervals—the surplus carbon of the planet that precipitated out of the exchange that occurs in the “fast” carbon cycle (see Berner 2003 and NASA 2011). Wherever carbon was “in excess,”¹ it would begin its journey into the “slow” carbon cycle, characterized by these safe reserve beds of oil, peat, limestone, coal, and other forms. We find that carbon that is in the fast cycle is in a living body of some sort, whereas in the slow cycle, it has moved into dead, inanimate mass such as limestone or coal.

Such a pyramidal structure of interrelated “fast” and “slow” carbon cycles mimics the global banking system. Daily trades by everyone on the planet take place at lightning speed and with increasingly abstract symbols. These billions of trades are then undergirded by a vast interconnected banking system that moves at a slower pace, clearing its accounts only at the end of each business day (not even on weekends!). Underneath this, we find the global central banks, which—at least during the era of the gold standard—would clear their accounts on an even longer temporal cycle, by shipping actual gold bars back and forth among themselves. At each level of the system, the “reserves” are built by the “excess” from the trades of the level above it, which sediment downward through the pyramid as “deposits” and “reserves,” while the lower levels release their excess by issuing credit.²

The analogy holds, as long as one can inhabit cosmic, rather than quotidian, time. Fossil fuel and limestone deposits are carbon reserves, built out of the sedimented excess of carbon trades occurring elsewhere. In the carbon cycle, volcanoes return the excess to the system, just as central banks can gush forth a wave of credit as needed in the banking cycle. According to this analogy, humanity is engaged in biomimicry on an epic scale, and our banking system is but an ersatz (and quite often dangerous) version of a more natural carbon banking system.³

The earth, then, is the world’s first bank. And as we become more self-conscious of the biomimicry we have performed through the ages, the earth must—we have been arguing—become the world’s last bank as well.

COSMIC THIEVERY

It requires an uncharacteristic humility on the part of humanity to recognize that we may have been merely blindly copying natural processes, and poorly copying them at that. We would like to think that our banking and currency systems are signature elements of our superiority and incontestable proof of our separation from other beasts, who could never conceptualize such complex exchange networks. But with “natural carbon banking” (see chapter 1), we may have to acknowledge that a nonhuman, nonrational system has “devised” a far better, safer, enduring, and more balanced system than our own. Consider Kimmerer’s description of the annual growth cycle of leeks:

Bulbs hold energy saved up for the next generation like money in the bank. Last fall the bulbs were sleek and fat, but, in the first days of spring, that savings account gets depleted as the roots send their stored energy into the emerging leaves to fuel their journey from soil to sunshine. In their first few days, the leaves are consumers, taking from the root, shriveling it up and giving nothing back. But as they unfurl they become a powerful solar array that will recharge the energy of the roots, playing out the reciprocity between consuming and producing in a few short weeks. (Kimmerer 2013, 178)

Without being cognizant of our mimicry of these sorts of systems described by Kimmerer, we may have made our first strides by merely creating embarrassing, and even dangerous, epigones. If such ignorant copying is viewed in a more mystical vein, then it gives hope that, with each alteration that we have made over many centuries to our own banking system, we may be getting closer and closer to finally awakening to nature’s more ingenious (and more sustainable and fair) banking system.⁴

But we have a long way to go.

In particular, the cultural and political left has long held a deep suspicion of banking and money, which we share. But stretched out on an epochal scale, perhaps critiques of banking and money from the left have only been asking that the system become more faithful to the natural processes that they have always gropingly mimicked. What if the left has “felt” or intuited that the injustices in the banking and monetary system represent moments when it has deviated from its inherent biomimicry, moments when it has been seized—often unjustly—by individuals rather than groups? Just because current banking practices often seem odious to many, it does not follow that all banking must be dismissed as useless. We can strive for a better way, and it feels especially pressing to at least consider the power of banks, given how few options we have for confronting climate change.⁵

Importantly, in the natural carbon-banking system, we cannot point to any one gear in the machine that acquires profits at the expense of others. The carbon reserves grow through the cast-off excess, but they also explode away, back out into a system thirsty for carbon. Fossil fuel and limestone deposits are not—from the perspective of nature—stereotypical “hoards” that are (supposedly) never shared.⁶ Instead, they are immensely safe pools of “asset” accumulation that could then be dispersed periodically, just like a reserve. Or, in the idiom of our book, an inalienable possession.

And then we came along.

If, today, we can finally awaken to our oneness with—and our extreme and utter reliance upon—nature, then we will immediately see that we have been stealing carbon reserves from nature; we have been viciously seizing nature’s most precious asset, its inalienable possession.⁷ In the process, we have been actively attacking nature’s entire carbon-exchange economy, the equivalent of a colonial government maliciously undermining an Indigenous monetary system. Humanity, seen in this light, becomes as loathsome as the terrorist-cum-criminal gang that shamelessly and violently (but ingeniously) robs the Federal Reserve’s gold in a subpar Bruce Willis movie.

So the first step in healing our relationship with nature would be—as countless others, and many religions, have long counseled—to see our oneness with nature. Immediately, these ongoing thefts of fossil-fuel and limestone vaults would then be seen as odious. But we would still need to seek redemption for our damaging crime spree. Sending ourselves to prison will not help anything, but we could rely on restitution rather than revenge, as many human systems of punishment do. If we see the global ecosystem as a giant tallying of carbon, and fossil fuel and limestone deposits as simply where the “surplus” has been stored, could we refill the coffers? In recent decades, both scientists and climate activists have been recommending and innovating a variety of ways to do just that. But these solutions suffer from a lack of collective management and organizational logistics. How can we restore, at scale, the “surplus” carbon we stole?

To do so, we would need to take a second step, which would get us closer to conscious biomimicry, by making sequestered carbon the asset that grounds a new currency system. As we have argued throughout this book, doing so would activate Gresham’s Law, pushing sequestered carbon into hoards while more abstract versions of it could circulate as chits. But further, another element of improved biomimicry would be to eliminate—or at least radically reduce—the wealth disparities that banking in today’s world seems to reproduce and consolidate. In our human world, banking often has a hierarchical character. It is a pyramidal structure, with “average” depositors at the bottom supporting an apex of elite and extremely wealthy owners of the means of distribution and production of money.

But this need not be the case, as Kimmerer’s description of a more egalitarian “leek banking,” above, attests.

In the first and last bank of nature, there may be “levels,” but as a non-agentive system, we cannot pinpoint any one element of the system that thrives at the expense of another. Further, we cannot pinpoint ungodly gains by any one part of the system, nor can we pinpoint a power hierarchy that would result from, or create, an unequal distribution of carbon. Instead, we witness distributed power in deep, systemic balance. There are slow and fast carbon cycles that interact, but each requires the other, and we see no domination or its necessary counterpart, subservience.

This chapter, therefore, will try to sketch out potential improvements to our biomimicry of nature’s first and last bank, by arguing that we can finally value carbon as much as nature does, while also bringing humanity’s banks and money more in line with the non-dominating example provided by nature’s first and last bank.

ALCHEMY

The first task is to spin trash into treasure. Like the alchemists of old, we must transmute something that has a low value on the marketplace—carbon—into something as precious to humanity as it already is to nature. As will be described in chapter 7, digital currencies have allowed a dispersed group of individuals to come together and declare anything they want to become the reserve of their mutually exchanged currency. As long as they—collectively—deem this reserve valuable, then the currency that gains its strength from the reserve will successfully circulate among them. Thus, like all currency experiments, a carbon-based coin would begin with activists on the frontline who all believe—regardless of its exchange value on a broader international marketplace—that sequestered carbon is the most valuable thing on earth.

By valuing sequestered carbon anew, we can reverse the cycle of extracting carbon from its natural vaults and begin the process of pushing it back into new artificial vaults, that is, human-made banks. Humanity has achieved this sort of “revaluation of values” in the past, so we need not be too pessimistic at the outset. For example, from the callous perspective of economics, human bodies have themselves been deemed “cheap” by far too many cultures throughout history. The United States was built upon the violent and cheap treatment of bodies—it was an entire economy and national political system that refused to agree that bodies from Africa were precious. Over time, we (mostly) eradicated slavery and made it illegal to buy and sell human bodies (Stanley 1998).⁸ Other less obvious examples abound from history, giving us hope that a small group of activists can begin a process of revaluation, transmuting sequestered carbon into treasure.

To do so, we would intervene in the carbon cycle that we violently disrupted when we started raiding the fossil fuel and limestone deposits. By “drawing down” carbon from the sky and then pyrolyzing it, we would newly baptize carbon as “sacred waste,” just as gold has been in the past. Just as with the history of gold recounted in chapter 3, we would ask prospectors to “mine” it, by following best practices as elaborated by scientists and activists already dedicated to the international movement to draw down carbon (Hawken 2017; Lehmann 2024).

We will describe other important ideas for storing carbon later in the chapter. Here, though, because our idea relies on the distributed agency of early-adopting activists, we must first describe the most democratically available form of carbon sequestration, or, as we can also call it, sky-mining. We need to build small banks, ones that can convince small, local depositors that they can be good stewards of their excess carbon. For that to happen, there must be a way to sky-mine, assay, and then store solidified carbon.

Thankfully, this activist corps of early adopters already exists, sky-mining in our very midst. In fanboy internet groups and in less bombastic bureaucratic spaces like Stockholm’s municipal waste authority, regular people from big cities and small towns are already pyrolyzing carbon in order to make it stable and storable (see Bloomberg Cities 2019; International Biochar Initiative n.d.; O’Sullivan 2016). They have all already taken the step of intervening in the carbon cycle at a small scale; they only lack the infrastructure of a community banking system with which to monetize their practice and thereby force more and more pyrolyzed carbon waste into community reserves. In fact, New York City’s “Green Markets” are already both circulating tokens and collecting compost—to build a carbon bank, they would only need to stitch these two elements together (see Grow NYC n.d.). The activists who run New York City’s Green Markets are, in other words, well on their way to creating the sacred excess that undergirds the circulation of currency. And so are many others.

Pyrolysis⁹ takes everyday carbon waste and bakes it in a kiln-like container at high temperatures. Normally, we associate this kind of cooking of carbon with the very problem we are aiming to solve: the overproduction of atmospheric carbon. But during pyrolysis, organic matter is subjected to high temperatures with little to no oxygen, so it never burns to ash. By the end of the process, we are left with biochar, which is essentially a stable carbon matrix (see, e.g., Bates and Draper 2019; Hawken 2017; Lehmann 2024).

All is not perfect and Edenic, however, because some by-product gasses are produced during this process, which is precisely why we believe that a collective institution—a carbon bank—should oversee the production of biochar rather than individuals. If done by a collectively owned bank, it will have the institutional size to invest and distribute these waste by-products and convert them into usable energy for local consumption, such as heating water or putting electricity back into the grid. Indeed, the waste by-product could be taken as a sort of “seigniorage” fee,¹⁰ which would help to cover bank costs.

But even more importantly, the fuel that results from pyrolysis would be classified as “biofuel,” which has come under justified attack from environmentalists and ecologists. Below, we will offer additional ideas for how our banks can combat biofuels fraud (where, for example, people chop down forests in order to get unjust biofuel credits). But here we want to continue our comparison with the era of the gold standard, when banks insisted on assaying gold on site and with their own instruments, rather than simply trusting outsiders. Transporting biomass is itself carbon intensive, so any biofuels resulting from biochar production can only be truly carbon negative if they are burned within a few miles of where they are harvested. For this reason, our pyrolyzers would have a specific catchment zone, beyond which they would not accept any materials for conversion to biochar.

Typically, biochar is seen as a soil amendment and a versatile additive in manufacturing (thereby enabling what Bates and Draper refer to as “carbon cascades”). We, however, are proposing that it could also serve as the (initial) liquid reserves of a new banking system. At the beginning of their existence, our communally owned local banks would grow biochar hoards; as they grew in stature, they could diversify, just as many nineteenth-century banks gradually moved away from gold and added silver to their reserves (because the total available feedstock for biochar production cannot draw down enough carbon, so banks will eventually be limited if they cannot find a way to add new modes of sequestration to their biochar reserves; see Woolf et al. 2010). Determining how to expand the reserves beyond biochar will require research and expertise, just as regular banks must carefully consider what assets comprise their reserves. So another one of our knock-on benefits would be that our local banks could hire soil scientists and ecologists rather than the standard risk managers typically found on Wall Street.

In short, we see biochar purely as a transitional step toward a carbon-banking system. Because it is so obviously and readily available to almost anyone, it will be easy to attract depositors and grow the Carbon Commons. Moreover, because it is so palpable—so “concrete”—biochar allows people to “sweat and struggle” for the success of their local bank, thereby building their commitment to it. To date, we have had only “easy” solutions pitched to us for how individuals can make an impact in the climate fight. Contrariwise, we believe people should “get their hands dirty” to truly feel that they are engaged, rather than just transferring some abstract dollars into their banks and then patting themselves on the back for a job well done.

Instead, human labor and interaction with the natural world, rather than with an iPhone screen, will catalyze not only our banks but also our communities and the ecologies within which they live. This collaborative process will aid in seeding and then nurturing the “ultimate concern” that will drive bank membership and dedication (Tillich 2009). As Peter Linebaugh, the storied historian of the commons, puts it, “the activity of commoning is conducted through labor with other resources; it does not make a division between ‘labor’ and ‘natural resources.’ On the contrary, it is labor which creates something as a resource, and it is by resources that the collectivity of labor comes to pass” (2014, 13; emphasis in original).

THE CARBON BANK AND ITS CURRENCY

At the outset of this process, we imagine a combination of conscientious businesses and “weekend warriors” as the main depositors to their local carbon bank and users of its complementary currency (complementary currencies were described in chapter 2). With new digital technology facilitating the storage and depositing of new currencies, a local carbon bank could be a small, independent affair—whether in the countryside or in the city. Avant-garde activists would come to the bank with their carbon waste (known as “feedstock” in the biochar community), whether this is compost from their personal kitchen in their city apartment or silage from a nearby juice producer in a rural area. These same activists could also provide seed capital for their local banks either by buying equity or simply donating credit, just as we witnessed people supporting local businesses during the COVID-19 pandemic (Malone 2020).

Aside from tallying carbon deposits and issuing loans in their new currency (let us call them “Cords” for the time-being¹¹), the banks would also be locations for assaying feedstock and converting it into biochar; in short, our local banks would dovetail the role of the old “private mints” with deposit banks, much like the goldsmiths of old (see Peebles 2004). Whenever convenient, a depositor would drop off this biomass at their local bank, which would use its pyrolyzer to convert it into biochar. Just like a regular bank (especially one during the gold-standard era), the customer would then part with her biochar in exchange for new Cords in her deposit account (a so-called “demand deposit account”) that could be traded for regular goods and services within the activist community that is using Cords. Such practices could easily expand once a local carbon bank is established. For example, in rural districts, people often have annual bonfires of the deadwood collected on their property; instead of converting all this wood into atmospheric carbon, an itinerant banker could travel the district during bonfire season with her mobile pyrolyzer, thereby adding new depositors while also reducing atmospheric carbon emissions.

The bank would place most of this assembled biochar into its reserves, knowing that its own currency is backed by the value of sequestered carbon; another portion could enter back into the community as loans. For example, a farmer who takes a loan from the bank could receive his funds in actual biochar to help defray the cost of fertilizer. Just as today’s borrowers must convince bankers that they have a profitable business idea, carbon-bank borrowers would have to convince carbon-bank lenders that their usage of the bank’s Cords and/or biochar would contribute to the fight against global warming. In this manner, local carbon banks would play a vital role in galvanizing the investment capital needed to launch a more sustainable economy that is carbon neutral or even potentially carbon negative. Because the loans in Cords would be used to spend money locally, these chits would then spread out into the community, further advertising the idea to a broader network of potential depositors.

The bank, as we have denoted throughout the book, would be communally owned (i.e., more like a credit union), meaning it would be owned by a mission-driven group of depositors, all dedicated to carbon sequestration as a project; this creates an internal safeguard against excessive growth, risk-taking, and unsustainable practices. Because our depositors will be attracted to the bank due to its mission, they will be particularly inclined to ensure that it never deviates from it.

It is worth remembering that the world is rife with communally owned banks, though their presence is often forgotten amid the deluge of large national and international banks (see Kaufer and Steponaitis 2021).¹² By insisting on locally owned banks, Cords currency achieves another objective, which is to help sustain and nurture local economies, thereby reducing the carbon expenditure connected to the movement of goods and people, while also becoming the expert clearinghouse on local best practices for carbon sequestration, which can vary greatly across climates and topographies.

Our banking system could, in fact, institutionalize this commitment to local economies by converting a bug of nineteenth-century American currency circulation into a feature. Because nineteenth-century American banks were chartered by state governments instead of the federal one, they necessarily issued local money. Each bank issued its own paper dollars, backed by gold or federally minted coin (see Greenberg 2020). As these bills circulated, they lost value as they became more physically distant from the issuing institution. So, for example, a Maryland merchant carrying Maryland-issued dollars to New York City would expect a “discount rate” to be applied to his less trustworthy Maryland dollars, whereas they would trade at par inside Maryland itself (Bensel 1990).

In keeping with the opening argument of our book—that social projects can fail at their intended outcome but still succeed in unforeseen ways—we believe that, in retrospect, this discounting system for American dollars created “transaction costs” that must have nurtured local economies. While extreme proponents of free trade may decry such transaction costs as something that would “distort” prices and hide potential “comparative advantages,” in the era of climate change, our discount rate policy could simply be used to reflect the true carbon footprint of goods and services that come from further away. Thus, just as with the nineteenth century, we can imagine a vast system of interlinked carbon banks, each issuing its own version of Cords backed by sequestered carbon. Each bank would, of course, happily exchange one Cord for another (just as Maryland dollars could be swapped for New York dollars), so that they could be liquid across vast distances. But the discount rate applied when using them in distant locales would encourage and sustain a diverse and lower–carbon footprint local economy.¹³

Once again taking inspiration from the nineteenth century, it is worth noting that Bensel (1990) argues that the American financial system as we know it today was built out of war-bond issuance during the American Civil War. Learning this, we can see that yet another pillar of today’s financial system was built, unquestionably, by mission-driven activists. Could we not see our battle against climate change today as something that merited a similar issuance of “war” bonds? These could then serve as the startup capital that would build the first carbon banks. Bensel further explains that, due to the outbreak of the war, the Northern banks that bequeathed the US financial system to us also suffered a complete break from Southern banks and all their investments in the American South. Yet, despite losing gargantuan parts of the market that sustained them and the free labor from slavery that gave them easy profits, these Northern banks nevertheless rose to dominate the planet. We can take similar inspiration from the idea that we must now make a complete break with the fossil fuel industry that currently drives our economy—despite the high sunk costs, future “stranded assets,” and the lost “free labor” provided by its subsidized energy.

Having described how the supply of Cords could enter the market as both loans and demand deposit accounts, we must now investigate the demand side. Because so many of us have been raised in the era of nationalized currencies, we have forgotten that currencies have, in the past, competed with each other for users. To find—and, ultimately, grow—their niche on the market, Cords will initially be attractive to three primary groups of users. The first two are obvious and have been mentioned already: (1) activists dedicated to the fight against climate change; imagine, for example, if a major environmentalist influencer told all her Instagram followers that she only used goods and services available for purchase with Cords; (2) producers of carbon waste as by-product; imagine, for example, if a major juice company discovered that they could deposit all the silage and cranberry pits they produce each year into a bank account, to be used to buy local services needed at their factory or even to pay a portion of their staff’s salary.

Our third group of potential users is burgeoning, if less obvious: the sphere of businesses that hope to compete in the market for environmentally friendly goods and services. A growing number of firms are trying to gain brand awareness in this field. Offering to receive payment in Cords would be an easy method for finding a dedicated set of customers. One could, for example, imagine that such firms would offer a discount to customers who paid in Cords. They could even “ring-fence” their products, offering them for sale only to holders of Cords. Such firms would, of course, therefore need to hold deposit accounts at their local carbon bank. If just one major retailer in a local district agreed to this, demand for Cords would increase dramatically.

Which brings us to another surprising benefit of local carbon banks, assuming they are owned by a group of like-minded activists dedicated to fighting climate change. Unlike paper money, digital money can police who uses its money. Paper money circulates as demand dictates (witness how the US dollar circulates among international criminal gangs, perhaps to the Fed’s chagrin), but digital currencies can be easily designed so that they can only be traded among people who hold accounts at verified institutions. And since 9/11, we have learned how to better police the opening of accounts, through the now international reach of the “know your customer” (KYC) requirements as dictated by the USA Patriot Act. Any bank, anywhere in the world, must subscribe to the KYC rules or be banned from trading precious US dollars.

The carbon-banking system could keep Cords dedicated to the currency’s original purpose by relying on the same idea. Carbon polluters would not be allowed to open accounts in carbon banks, the same way that terrorists—since the advent of KYC—cannot find many banks that will serve them. If carbon polluters wanted to gain access to the community of Cords users, they could only do so by proving to our bank verifiers (see chapter 6) that they are no longer polluters.¹⁴ Such a process has the knock-on effect of creating a feedback loop, in that people who cannot accept payment in Cords would be presumed to be polluters and thus forever avoided by activist consumers. Not having a Cords account could become the digital equivalent of being tarred and feathered.¹⁵ If Cords can maintain strict standards and continue to draw in new users, this KYC system would offer a great push to businesses the world over to alter their polluting ways.

Like much that runs through our proposals in this book, we believe this idea retakes control of business ethics that have become too lax. If we collectively organize our own banks with their own climate-fighting currency, then we can collectively penalize the polluters who have been given free rein by governments and central banks alike. In the face of neglect—or even recalcitrance—on the part of the governments that should have protected us,¹⁶ a collectively owned carbon-banking and currency system will allow us to step into the void and become a new wing of banking regulation that enforces ecological investment and trade. In the blunt language of Marxism, much of the environmentalist movement to date has been about attempting to alter consumption habits, whereas building our own banks is a method of “seizing the means of production.”

RESERVES BEYOND BIOCHAR

All sound banks require reserves, and a carbon-banking system would be no different. Because biochar has a market value already, we are well on our way. Once monetized, biochar’s value will likely grow, benefiting both the bank and any early adopters of the currency. But this can also cause problems, for if the currency proves to be very popular, suddenly a local bank could have more biochar on its hands than it could safely store. To be clear, this is the inverse of the bank runs that we covered in chapter 4; instead, depositors are rushing into a bank because they believe so strongly in its mission. Just as a carbon bank must plan for runs, it must plan for their opposite as well. The US dollar experiences this sort of “anti-run” frequently, whenever global economic instability causes investors to rush to hold dollars, but it also hearkens back to our discussion of “sterilization” in chapter 3. So we are by no means in uncharted territory.

Still, we only provide these ideas to begin the brainstorming, and we firmly believe that experts will have far better ideas if and when the banks get off the ground. Further (and as stated above), we suspect that biochar will prove crucial for beginning this movement to create carbon banks, so the ideas listed here are not necessarily appropriate at the very outset of the project. Nevertheless, because holding a giant mound of biochar might prove prohibitively expensive—at least at urban bank branches—we must eventually imagine other forms of highly liquid reserves that a carbon bank could hold (and potentially move, assuming the carbon footprint is low), so that it can be prepared for both runs and their opposite.

Simply put, this means that the bank must own sequestered carbon in a ready-to-hand form, free of legal, ethical, or pragmatic hurdles, while also having a plan in place for any sudden deluges of incoming sequestered carbon. Given the already scandalous history of “greenwashing,” our banks would be subjected to a great deal of scrutiny from depositors when managing reserves that are threatened with either excess or scarcity. Unlike the wildcat banks of the nineteenth-century United States, our local banks would welcome this scrutiny, for it would force them to hold true to their identity and mission.

Most obviously, because our banks could be part of a network of like-minded banks, one could imagine following a practice once common among the world’s central banks. Because it is expensive and risky to transport gold bars across the world, many central banks during the era of the gold standard chose to simply keep their gold reserves at the US Federal Reserve and the Bank of England (some still do this today). While the gold was stored in London or New York, it still remained part of the reserves of another central bank. Following this logic, carbon banks in urban districts could hold their reserves in more rural banks in exchange for a fee. In the event of a “run” on an urban carbon bank, it could simply call upon its reserves in the rural district. Assuming depositors trust the entire network of banks, there would likely be no need to actually disgorge the biochar to the holders of the chits.

Still, we are aiming to reduce carbon emissions, so it makes little sense to frequently transport biochar across vast stretches of space. Without seeing the future, we cannot know all the novel ideas that might emerge once climate activists and financial experts alike put their minds to combatting this potential problem. However, we can offer some additional initial ideas, especially concerning alternative forms of reserves, if only to grant credence to the idea that carbon banking can overcome the sorts of obvious hurdles that it would likely confront.

In this regard, readers can gain additional inspiration by studying the global movement to create “Islamic finance.” Due to its own particular mission, many religious rules mandate that Islamic financial institutions cannot offer the same products as a standard Euro-American bank. As a result, countless smart people have worked on solving this problem, in conjunction with willing governments and regulators. Their answers are not yet “perfect,” but they are forging ahead with Islamic finance nonetheless (see Rudnyckyj 2018). With all of this in mind, here is a short list of possibilities for reserves beyond biochar:

1. A carbon bank could sell any excess biochar to its local community in exchange for dollars. With those dollars, the bank could purchase a healthy forest filled—by its very nature—with sequestered carbon. Upon purchasing it, the bank would immediately parcelize the land into tiny tracts, so that they could easily be sold to depositors in the event of a run. Because depositors are already committed to the mission of the bank, in such instances they would merely be acquiring a private carbon hoard that they would themselves value, rather than acquiring something that they would then try to sell or chop down. Compare this to Fullarton’s argument about the “sponge mechanism” that governed the flow between banks and private hoards in early nineteenth-century England. As the collective gold hoard broke apart in a crisis, it did not mean that people stopped valuing the gold stored there, only that they no longer trusted the management of the collectivized gold, and therefore the depositors aimed to privatize it.

2. In the process of granting loans, the bank will acquire collateral on many investment projects. For a certain portion of them, such as a project dedicated to silviculture, the bank would normally issue a mortgage on the property that could grant it title in the event of default. However, because of the need to think creatively about the reserve fund, perhaps the bank would instead ask that the silviculture project offer a parcelized tract of the entire property as the collateral (by transferring it to the bank, it could get a lower interest rate; alternatively, it could exist as a transferable lease that lasted as long as the mortgage—a sort of annuitized rider to the broader loan). In this manner, the bank can sell this parcel to a currency holder if needed.

3. Conservation easements and such things as “Pooled Timber Income Funds” (New England Forestry Foundation n.d.) could be used by the bank when extending loans as well. The former have a long tradition in the United States and could easily be considered liquid enough to be transferred to a new owner if need be. For example, a forest owner could acquire chits by merely transferring title into an easement and granting it to the local bank. In this regard, it is worth noting that a young forest sequesters more and more carbon as it grows, which offers the possibility that a bank that owns trees can treat them precisely as a bond that matures over time; at the end of its life, a tree could be converted to biochar and the bond would reach “full maturity” (Bhatt 2020; Reed 2020). These could also serve as the very first reserves of a nascent local bank, wherein a local landowner could offer an easement upon which chits could be issued, prior to the bank even owning a pyrolyzer.

4. There is also a rapidly growing market in so-called “Green Bonds.” Assuming our verifiers (as described in chapter 6) approve of the bond, and assuming it truly represents sequestered carbon, this will be a highly liquid asset that could safely be placed in the reserve fund of urban banks that are running out of storage space. Our banks could sell excess biochar locally in order to acquire dollars to buy these sorts of bonds. We remain, however, highly alert to the manner in which these sorts of products often represent efforts to simply greenwash. One knock-on benefit of building carbon banks would be the ability to raise the standard for such products, in the event that they have actual promise.

5. Innovators in multiple spaces are finding new ways to draw down carbon (Hawken 2017). Should our verifiers deem a new technique to be sound and not fraudulent, we could sweep up these products and add them to our reserves.

6. Finally, sterilization could be transparently embedded in a bank’s planning, rather than turned to only in crisis. Unlike most banks that must worry about the periodic bursts of trust and enthusiasm that cause deluges of deposits, we would welcome it, given the overarching mission to sequester carbon; our depositors would likely consider sterilization an achievement rather than something that could destabilize the system. Still, sterilization requires thoughtful management, and the deluge of excess reserves would need to land somewhere as secure and inaccessible as Tutankhamun’s tomb, as described at the close of chapter 3. But “secure and inaccessible” need not mean “secret.” Bank verifiers (described in chapter 6) will need to have access to these locations to ensure that no greenwashing is afoot, so the location can never be truly unknown, though access to the precise location could be tiered, just as only a few bank employees actually have the keys to the vault. Fortuitously, such locations where the excess reserves would be buried and permanently hidden would likely be “wastelands” or even urban brownfields in need of the regeneration and growth that soil amendment can provide. Banks could consider it a standard part of their mission and practice to buy up such wastelands cheaply and then gradually restore them to health via sterilization.

With techniques such as these, tallied reserves could gradually become a mix of actual biochar, other forms of sequestered carbon, and more abstract representations of sequestered carbon that is stored elsewhere. The latter is essential not only for building a global army of sequesterers but also for other matters of banking infrastructure and practice. Most crucially, the value of sequestered carbon may vary depending on local ecological conditions. This could give rise to both arbitrage and a mix of values for locally issued currencies; that is, some would be worth more, and some less, rather than reflecting one global standard of value. Via an interest rate, local banks could tell their communities how much biochar is worth in their jurisdiction, and this would then also relate to the discounting of “foreign” bills discussed above.

But it also raises the crucial issue of how this system would cope with the looming threat of arbitrage. If biochar is worth more in local Brazilian banks than it is in local Alaskan banks, what would stop an international market from emerging that would have a disastrous impact on humanity’s carbon footprint? Devious schemes would surely emerge to transport enormous amounts of biochar from cheaper zones to more expensive ones.

Firstly, the growing market in abstract representations of sequestered carbon could greatly aid in keeping biochar’s values hovering within a “band” of value. Hard biochar could be an “anchor,” signaling the spread of total values of sequestered carbon. By the time someone tried to move a cargo of biochar from the Amazon to Alaska, the costs of doing so would have caused the trader to lose money.

Secondly, as the gold standard taught, “capital controls” can be successfully implemented. Capital controls have a bad name among “neoliberal” economists, but they need not be vilified in the fight against climate change.¹⁷ Capital controls have been essential to economic governance over many centuries, sometimes working better, and sometimes worse, but they are still potentially useful. Indeed, despite its general hatred of capital controls, the United States itself still relies on multiple modes of monitoring the flow of capital into and out of its boundaries (e.g., with regard to terrorist financing or the movement of money to offshore jurisdictions). The same principle could be relied on by our vigilant banks. With digital money, it would be easy and cheap to label the origins of the sequestered carbon that the chits represent. A networked global system could, therefore, quite easily stop the movement—if necessary, for reasons of either economic stability or to better fight climate change—of sequestered carbon.¹⁸

ASSETS AND LIABILITIES

Having discussed carbon banking’s potential tactics regarding the crucial holding of reserves, we should now also discuss overall assets and liabilities more carefully, without, hopefully, boring the reader too much. As with the above section, we leap into this effort with the understanding that the crowd-sourced wisdom that will emerge after the establishment of carbon banks will be far superior to our suggestions here. Still, in presentations of our ideas over the years, we have learned that some of the basics of banking infrastructure need to be translated to a more popular idiom.

Banks, it seems, are bewildering enough that the public generally is content to leave their smooth operations to the experts. In this fashion, they become not unlike the bridges that dapple the modern landscape—vast and impressive feats of technical wizardry in which the average user has no interest. How many highway bridges have you crossed in your life? How often have you considered the immense work and expertise that goes into building and monitoring them? Many of us similarly rely on banks in our daily lives without pondering, even for a minute, how they operate.

For example, very few people seem to understand that the deposit they hold at their bank is a liability on the bank’s balance sheet. They simply seem to think that it’s “their money,” as opposed to a legal contract that binds them in a credit/debt relationship with the bank. In the United States, these deposits are guaranteed by complex mechanisms such as the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC),¹⁹ but the bank is nevertheless expected to cover these liabilities with its assets in the event that the depositor would like to close her account. This means that, every time a new depositor joins a bank, the bank must be certain to have the proper assets to convert the digitally tallied chits in the account into hard cash, should the need arise.

Even less understood by the public is that circulating national currency (hard cash) stands as a liability on the national central bank’s account. In the United States, this might not mean much, since the US dollar stands at the apex of global reserve currencies. But in less powerful nations, a run on the central bank—known as a “currency crisis”—occurs with a surprising degree of frequency (see chapter 4). In a stampede, people can rush to convert their Thai baht (for example) into some “harder” currency that must be somewhere in the chain of reserves. If no conversion is available, the currency must be devalued; alternatively, banks can suspend currency conversion.

Either way, for our purposes, this shows that circulating Cords would stand as the premier liability for a carbon bank. As described above, the hope would be that the reserves would provide a sense of stability, such that users would be unlikely to abandon the system. Holders of bank equity would also represent fiscal commitments to which the bank needs to constantly attend, but recall that the savings bank revolution was also started by philanthropists, so this need not be the case (see chapter 4).

As for assets, the bank would own the reserves as discussed above. But it would also seek to trigger a circular economy in its own local area (see Raworth 2017). To do so, it would issue loans to projects that aim to increase carbon sequestration (or reduce carbon footprints, if the verifiers deem this equally significant). As with all banks, these loans would then sit on the asset side of the ledger, representing investments that the bank has made in the local transformation to a more sustainable economy.

For starters, local banks could issue loans to the many sequestration ideas and projects that are carefully cataloged in the book Drawdown (Hawken 2017). For example, grassland offers a well-known carbon sink. And yet tragically, as documented by Hawken and many others, grassland has been disappearing rapidly. If a local farmer wanted to raise sheep, there is good evidence that such flocks aid in the restoration of grasslands; such a farmer could come to her local carbon bank and request a loan in Cords. Likewise, local builders who hope to build denser housing stock with zero-carbon emissions (as is today happening in Oslo, Norway) and with carbon-sequestering materials could similarly apply for a loan. In each instance, new Cord chits would enter the economy.

Regenerative agriculture also offers immense promise for carbon banks, as do potential afforestation projects. Whatever the project, this sort of work would also continually—but not always—open up new spaces for the use of biochar and other forms of sequestered carbon, thereby causing its value to rise still more. For example, farmers may decide that they need biochar from the bank in order to help fertilize their fields. Or new methods of stewarding local water supplies may require more biochar for their filtration services. Less prosaically, new forms of concrete are being invented as we speak, which use sequestered carbon to improve strength and longevity. Just as the value of the US dollar rose as it became the international standard of value, such new demands for sequestered carbon would further catalyze the transition to a circular economy.

For projects such as these and countless others, our carbon banks would have more latitude to offer capital, since they will be owned by local activists who are less interested in profit and more interested in building a circular economy. The totality of these sorts of projects as a whole must cover the operation costs of the bank, but there is no iron law that says that banks must make obscene profits; indeed, one of the long-standing appeals of both credit unions and the mission-driven banks that have been launched in parts of Scandinavia is that they need not focus exclusively on profits, so we already have a range of inspirational models. Indeed, our local banks might decide to donate any profits to the further transition to a circular economy, rather than distribute them as dividends to their owners.²⁰

All of these conjoined efforts to grow the carbon banking sector would constitute an attempt to pay back the carbon that we already so thoughtlessly stole from the first bank. Our “cosmic theft” has been unpaid for too long, and it is well past the time to seek redemption via restitution. As with many instances of assessing damage for bad behavior, we should be responsible for restoring the victim to the status quo ante. A carbon-banking system could organize this act of redemption and restitution, winding back the clock on our unjust seizure.

If—hope beyond hope—a global carbon-banking system emerged that was powerful enough to sequester as much carbon as has been stolen since the dawn of the industrial era, then the carbon banks would respond as banks have done in the past, by nimbly reassessing their risk portfolios. Who knows? They could even stop issuing new chits and agree that the global economy no longer needs any more transformative “growth.” At all events, a critique of carbon banking that worries about too much sequestration should be filed under “Problems we’d be lucky to have.”

BANK NESTING AND NETWORKING

Central banking was not necessary for the savings banking revolution that accompanied the modern era. Indeed, had central banks existed everywhere at the dawn of the industrial era, perhaps the banking revolution would have been stopped in its tracks, or at least slowed. Likewise, we are in no rush to push for a central carbon bank.²¹ This stance reinforces our commitment to the idea that all the elements of this policy need not be perfectly worked out in advance, much like the US banking system was not perfectly planned when it first began; a carbon-banking system will instead grow and mature organically.

Nevertheless, to be successful, a carbon bank would be greatly aided by being part of a larger network of carbon banks, so it is worth probing the methods of internal collaboration of carbon banking that are essential for stabilizing the value of the overall chits issued. Just like in nature itself, diversity and dynamism help stabilize the system at large, so we should imagine an interconnected network of carbon banks rather than ones that go it entirely alone. This follows directly from Ostrom’s design principles, where she notes that commons are more successful when dynamically nested within larger organizations (e.g., Ostrom 1990, 189). While networked, the owner-depositors of nested carbon banks could add their own regulations and bylaws that are relevant for their own local ecologies, while still belonging to wider groups.

Such a network could be anarchically organized, as much nineteenth-century banking was. Carbon banks could assess the value of one another’s issued currencies and deem them more or less reliable, depending on the soundness of the issuing bank. Like in the nineteenth century, such a network might “evolve” toward a hierarchical network, with some local banks being more powerful and better recognized than others, but it need not do so. Either way, they could collaborate and compete, trading reserves and discounting chits as needed. In such a system, the success or failure of individual banks would rely on the faith of the depositor-owners, who would be more responsible than a typical bank depositor to monitor the soundness of their local bank. Just like any other business, if it fails to read market conditions or behaves irresponsibly, it could go “belly-up” and disappear or be bought by other local banks. There would be no central bank that could make it “too big to fail” in the event of a true crisis.

If the free-market nature of this proposal sounds anathema to many climate activists, we agree and understand. Indeed, it follows a proposal made by the notoriously conservative economist Friedrich Hayek (1976) in his text The Denationalization of Money. And yet astute readers have noted that Ostrom herself was perhaps inspired by Hayekian notions of plucky individuals innovating in the face of governmental failure (Wall 2017). More importantly, we remind our readers that the quickest route to convincing governments to step in and begin to regulate banks is for them to be structured in this more anarchic fashion; if many of us want and hope for more involvement of our governments in climate finance, building an unregulated banking structure may be the shortest pathway to that ultimate goal. Again, we have been placed in this climate crisis by dint of the failure of our governments, and they are clearly not responding to other tactics designed to convince them. Threats to their power are often the best way to get them to respond.

But if a free-market system isn’t appealing, we can also imagine a more hierarchical structure, wherein one publicly owned central bank monitors (and often holds) the reserves of all the independent locally owned banks. Perhaps, like the Italian Central Bank or the American regional reserve banks, these would be constituted out of share capital provided by the local banks in the network. They would more or less agree to be regulated-in-common by this “sovereign” bank that lorded over them (see chapter 4). It could set interest rates, determine reserve minimums, and, crucially, inject or withdraw credit in so-called “open market operations” in order to influence the price of Cords. It could also—theoretically—lend stability to the system by telling all Cord depositors across the system that it stands as the “lender (or dealer) of last resort” in the event of a banking crisis.

Expert treatises and training in deploying these monetary-policy tactics are available in myriad locations, so we will not dwell too much on them here. Suffice it to say that we see no reason why a carbon central bank would be prohibited from engaging in many of the sorts of monetary-policy interventions offered to standard central banks, with one exception: Because it operates on the principle of “commodity money” (unlike some very powerful central banks), it cannot simply “magically print” its own money. Instead, it must find—and purchase—extant carbon sequestrations whenever it issues new money (just as central banks were constrained during the era of the gold standard). This will be addressed in more detail in chapter 8, concerning the question of scarcity.²²

Given that carbon banks would operate on locally “fixed” (or at least “flexible,” i.e., within a band) exchange rates between sequestered carbon and Cord chits, much monetary policy under this proposed system would need to look to the era of the gold standard rather than more recent innovations in monetary policy. However, the abundance of carbon (versus the scarcity of gold) might allow for some syntheses of lessons from both eras of monetary governance. For example, during the gold standard, central banks sometimes needed to set interest rates higher in order to encourage gold to flow back into their countries, since it had decamped due to higher prices offered abroad. In other words, while Hume’s “price-specie flow” mechanism²³ might occasionally hold sway, there was always room for manipulating the movement of gold (see chapter 3, and below). Because mining and sequestering carbon will likely be easier than mining and sequestering gold, more localized economies might be better able to govern themselves, not in altogether “closed” systems but simply because they would not need to turn to the international marketplace in order to issue more currency if needed.

A central core of Cords banking is that we have been callously abandoned and willfully neglected by our national governments. They have only paid lip service to the climate crisis, bringing us to the state that we are in today. By our lights, the US Federal Reserve or the Bank of England (Boait 2019) could simply announce, by fiat, today that they are sequestering carbon as a core technique for backing their currencies, and we would be well on our way toward a solution (at least with regard to sequestration—many other strands of the climate battle need to fought in other ways); instead, science-fiction authors and academics must advocate for more novel methods.

Considering this abandonment by national governments, we see little reason why our independent banks should recognize national borders when it comes to discounting chits (of course they would have to follow local laws and pay local taxes). If national borders can be ignored when building a network of carbon banks, then it may be worth modeling the networking hierarchy described above more along the lines of the Bank of International Settlements (BIS) rather than a standard central bank. The BIS is the central banks’ central bank. As such, it operates with a “unit of account” currency—the “special drawing rights” (SDR) issued by the International Monetary Fund since 1969—rather than exclusively favoring one currency over all others. It may be wise, while also signaling the global nature of the climate challenge, to refuse to favor any one local bank’s currency with special status at the central carbon bank and instead to mimic the SDR’s tactic of calculating value via a “basket” of circulating currencies.²⁴ If such a global unit of account undergirded the entire Cords system, then there would be no “optimal currency zones” wherein some local banks were more prone to help closer banks rather than more distant ones in the event of a crisis. It would be a truly global system, bypassing the governmental sclerosis that has stymied all attempts at addressing the climate crisis.

The BIS is intriguing as a model for other reasons as well. Firstly, it is co-owned and cofounded by multiple central banks. And yet, as discussed in chapter 4, central banks themselves often have “fuzzy” ownership, suggesting that the BIS is not really owned by any particular institution or governing body but instead exists in the “global commons.” Secondly, all profits that it makes every year are funneled back into its own reserve fund rather than enriching any individuals, proving that banks need not be organized around ownership structures that deliver massive profits to their owners (unless it chooses to issue dividends to its owner-banks, which are themselves typically owned by the public). Thirdly, its reserves are constituted by an abstract currency that is traded not by everyday people but only institutionally, at the highest level of global governance. This opens up possibilities for fighting against the dangers of biochar arbitrage (as discussed above), for a carbon central bank could instead transmit digital representations of sequestered carbon, as needed, to lend stability to the Cords monetary system. Again, sequestered carbon would “anchor” the system, while many currencies that represent it would circulate (but still have value differentials because of the local economic conditions they represent); some of these currencies, if deemed sound enough, could even serve as reserves themselves at the carbon-banking equivalent of the BIS.²⁵

While perhaps appearing as weird and arcane, these structural aspects of the BIS seem more like inspirational guideposts. Why must such fuzzy, communal, and non-profit modes of ownership only be reserved for the world’s wealthiest and most powerful central banks? If it works for them, we can make it work during this crucial moment in the fight against climate change. It is high time that independent actors jump into the void created by the rank irresponsibility of the global financial system and various national governments; intelligent structures and systems have been built and accreted over long periods of time, but they are no longer rising to the occasion.

Currency itself is one of those intelligent structures and systems. Scanning world history, many far weirder currencies than a carbon one have traversed the globe successfully—sometimes without even a vivacious banking infrastructure. The cowrie didn’t respect national borders, nor did salt when it reigned as a currency in South Asia. On far smaller scales, many “local” currencies have also taken off in popularity at various times and places, often in response to a crisis in a local economy, just as we confront a crisis today.

Though the era of national currencies’ hegemony has caused us to forget this fact, it remains true that the thread of world monetary history is dominated by multiplicity (see Kuroda 2020). A carbon currency could thrive alongside countless other currencies and need not “conquer” these competitors in order to be successful. Instead, it could wend its way into various parts of the economy as a “complementary currency” and gradually gain popularity, as it offers an outlet for millions of people who are yearning to lend a hand in the fight against climate change.

Many proposals for solving a “wicked problem” can start at a small scale, even if this can feel demoralizing to the earliest agents of change. Contrariwise, to date, the fight against climate change has been dominated by grand visions that can only be accomplished by governments or giant corporations. Where has that gotten us? Rather than being a quick and easy fix, a carbon-banking system could return power to local communities who could do their small part in the broader campaign, standing as a guiding light for others to follow.

NOTES

1. We reiterate that “excess” is not the right term, since nature finds a use for all of this abundance.

2. Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) might beg to differ. But even if MMT is correct about sovereign banking reserves, the fact remains that many countries still must build their reserves up through the accumulation of excess, rather than just calling them into being ex nihilo. This was equally true during the era of the gold standard.

3. Tellingly, the world’s many monetary systems up until the twentieth century often suffered from predictable, alternating waves of feasts and famines of circulating money. This rhythm precisely mimicked the agricultural cycle, wherein farmers had an abundance of money during the harvest season and a scarcity of it during other parts of the year. Money hoarded up in cities would travel centrifugally during harvest times out to the countryside and then centripetally back to urban centers afterwards. So the monetary system has, in past versions at least, already been mimicking an annual cycle of nature’s abundance and scarcity.

4. But recall from chapter 1 that this logic is not evolutionary in the sense of value judgments of what is “better” or “worse.” That could mean, for example, that the first attempts at biomimicry were more perfect than the version that we have today. In other words, we need not endorse the banking revolution and say that it is “better” than other cultural forms of credit/debt circulation and storage; we are merely saying that it is the cultural form we have today, and we are analyzing it as such.

5. In this regard, we can take inspiration from Ann Pettifor, whose recent book The Production of Money (2017), discusses the benefits of banks but still insists that there should be far more public control over them.

6. Peebles (2008 and 2014) critiques this stereotype as misinformed. Instead, as with all stereotypes, we should scratch below the surface and, in this case, see what “hegemonic” work any accusations of “hoarding” are doing.

7. In light of the preceding argument, gendering nature with the prototypical female “Mother Nature” feels of a piece with of our long process of othering it. On the other hand, “it” feels even more alienating, so we will simply overuse the term “nature” rather than rely on pronouns here.

8. By no means do we intend to suggest that this fight is over. We only mean to argue that vast numbers of people can dramatically change their ideas about what is valued and what is not valued.

9. Helpful videos about pyrolysis abound on YouTube. But one can also turn to authoritative sources such as the IPCC 2019, Lehmann 2024, and Project Drawdown (Hawken 2017) for more information on the precise chemistry involved in pyrolysis.

10. Seigniorage is the fee or “tax” that mints used to charge to convert gold into coin. Today, it is largely considered a tax that governmental monetary authorities accrue from the printing of money, and it funds their operations. See, inter alia, Rogoff 2017 or Peebles 2020. For a study of private-bank seigniorage, see Bjerg et al. 2017.

11. We cannot emphasize enough that “Cord” is just a working title to facilitate understanding. We have absolutely no proprietary interest in naming the currency. It was chosen because “cord” is a standard measurement for wood, while also carrying the meaning of binding ties among people, e.g., “umbilical cord.”

12. Please also visit Filene.org to find a wealth of data and history from the United States’ premier think tank dedicated to credit unions.

13. While this might sound implausible, it is already the logic behind successful “local currencies” the world over, as described in chapter 2. For example, Ithaca Dollars were exchangeable for US dollars, but the entire logic behind them was that they lose (all of) their value upon decamping from Ithaca. Our proposal is less extreme, but follows the same logic that some people choose to hold a currency that reflects their values, even if it is more cumbersome or financially penalizing to carry it in some jurisdictions. We again mention tithing to clarify to naysayers that many people do choose to make financial sacrifices for causes they truly believe in.

14. Governments use regulations and laws all the time to control the flow of their currencies. For example, it can be quite hard for US banks to send US dollars to offshore jurisdictions. There is no reason our banks could not create similar barriers to entry for polluters. Taking it even further, our banks could decide at the outset, for example, that any money derived from the biofuels market is not permitted to be deposited.

15. A sort of private currency—Mastercard—has already leveraged its strength in this regard, at the behest of anti-pornography campaigners. It recently decided to stop allowing payments to occur between holders of Mastercard accounts and content providers on “OnlyFans,” a pornography website (Padgett n.d.). While people on the left and the right might disapprove of Mastercard attaining this sort of power, we are only pointing it out to prove that the technique already exists and could be operationalized to punish carbon polluters. Also see Jacquet 2015 on the power of shame.

16. See our prologue for a discussion of how governments the world over have broken the core aspect of their “social contract” with their citizens. To put it bluntly, they have failed to protect us.

17. A robust debate emerged in 2021 when economist Isabella Weber proposed a variety of price controls for dealing with the post-pandemic bout of high inflation. She was initially castigated by many economists, including Paul Krugman. Later, Krugman withdrew his critiques and recognized the value of Weber’s research into past successful examples of price controls and her policy proposals for today. Price controls are not the same as capital controls, but the episode reveals how economic policy advice is changing before our very eyes.

18. It is perhaps helpful to quickly provide examples of how an abstract representation of something concrete that will never be “mobile” itself can nevertheless traverse the globe. For example, people living in Hong Kong who hope to hide some of their money from the Chinese government can own slices of buildings in Manhattan that they never even plan to live in. Or what of the famous Yap currency? One of the giant stones sank in a storm, but it nevertheless still has credit issued upon it, despite its extreme inaccessibility (Fitzpatrick and McKeown 2020, 16). Humankind, it would seem, is highly creative when it comes to these questions; possibilities emerge out of the bonds of social trust and legal infrastructure, rather than out of pragmatic questions such as “yes, but can I ever move that slice of the building in Manhattan and truly own it?” See Pistor 2020, 225.

19. Credit unions rely on a different type of national insurance, overseen by the National Credit Union Administration.

20. Once again, we recommend the book Just Money (2021) by Kaufer and Steponaitis, which catalogs and studies many such banks.

21. The renowned economist Kenneth Rogoff has proposed an international central carbon bank (see Rogoff 2017). Similarly, the well-known proposal for a Global Carbon Reward argues for a carbon reward that would be coordinated through central-bank cooperation.

22. Lest this sound far-fetched, Zoltan Pozsar at Credit Suisse, a leading economic analyst who has been highly active in monetary policy debates, believes that the world is inexorably heading toward “Bretton Woods III.” As he describes it, Bretton Woods III is absolutely a return to commodity money. See Pozsar 2022.

23. The price-specie flow mechanism dictates that, in a “fixed” exchange regime, price differences and gold holdings will “endogenously” balance one another over time. If a country attracts too much gold (because it has a positive balance of trade), it will issue more currency. This, in turn, will cause foreign goods to become more expensive, thereby allowing the positive balance of trade to rebalance itself and become neutral or even negative (see Hume 1987).

24. The BIS revisits the mix of its representative basket every five years (see International Monetary Fund n.d.). A Cord banking system could likewise commit to a periodic re-evaluation of its grounding basket. As Cords become more popular and new banks emerge, this would be necessary—and welcomed—because each new bank represents newly sequestered carbon.

25. It is worth noting here that SDRs themselves operate on the principle of commodity money. The IMF issues, circulates, and distributes SDRs, but it can only do so by ensuring that, somewhere in the system at large, there exists the requisite “basket” of its constitutive currencies so that an SDR can be exchanged for them on demand. As the IMF states, “The SDR is neither a currency nor a claim on the IMF. Rather, it is a potential claim on the freely usable currencies of IMF members. SDRs can be exchanged for these currencies” (International Monetary Fund n.d.)

6 MUSTERING A PLATFORM ARMY

We refuse to assume that the nation-state is the only realistic system of power for dealing with our fears and offering solutions.

—David Bollier and Silke Helfrich, Free, Fair, and Alive

COUNTING AND ACCOUNTING

The sheer scale of it all numbs the mind. What we called humankind’s “cosmic thievery” in chapter 1 has been estimated to have moved 147 billion tons of oil out of its carbon vaults and placed much of that in the sky (this number does not even include our other thefts, such as of coal, natural gas, or deforestation).¹ It’s staggering to consider, but it’s also a bleak testimony to the power of humankind to geoengineer on a vast, dispersed scale already.

Having now recognized that we have stolen all of this carbon from the first bank without paying for it, we need to wind back the clock and seek redemption for our crime. We will never be able to fully repair what we have done, but we can offer restitution. Models for repaying for previous looting exist, though usually such agreements occur with another human entity, so they can be negotiated and agreed upon by all impacted parties. In the case of unpaid-for carbon theft, we have no such luxury, since we have stolen from the more-than-human world. Nevertheless, if we can awaken to see this transportation and conversion of carbon as a variation of looting rather than a fair exchange, we can gain a new sense of agency over the problem by accounting (in both senses) for our cosmic theft.

Accounting, thankfully, is something that humans love to do. We can’t help ourselves from trying to represent complicated, nuanced things with brute numbers. Sometimes we get it close to right, sometimes we get it horribly wrong, but we never get it perfect. There is always a gap. In this sense, accounting feels a bit like the mystical striving that we tackled in our first chapter—by quantifying, humans are reaching for artificial simplification in a naturally complex world. Numbers and naming are how we make sense of things; in so doing, we hope to “perfectly” understand the world, even if our reach always exceeds our grasp.²

Currency is one of the most egregious producers of this gap. Quantifying the world is one of currency’s central tasks. Even if it fails at this task every day, it still works well enough (most of the time). Indeed, its failures are so consistent and so well documented that perhaps it is worth asking if these endemic “failures” to accurately measure the world are actually part of what makes currency work. This gap, endemic to currency’s functioning, sparks the very tit-for-tat debate that builds our economic world. In turn, that unavoidable and incessant debate helps bring into being our common social world, as it forces us to endlessly contest and fine-tune the values that reign in a given community. Since the theft was perpetrated against an external Other, (mistakenly) seen as outside our community, the very process of accounting will create a more expansive community, necessarily conversing with, and finally treating as equal, the more-than-human world.

In other words, quantifying the world is inherently messy, and this messiness creates debates over our various understandings of that world. We use currency every day to debate the veracity of our abstract understandings. Currency beckons to us with its tantalizing promise to “get close enough” to a sense of satisfaction for all parties during the exchange of objects. In other words, currency’s obvious inability to perfectly measure the world is generative of that same world. Its ongoing imperfection has never stopped it from having a massive impact on the lived world, nor stopped our accounting of it.³

A carbon currency will likewise always be imperfect; the vast errors that it will produce are already easily foreseeable. But the flaws in the daily life of any currency do not entirely vitiate its overall power, just as the US dollar churns onward despite its everyday failings to achieve this perfect representation of the world. We must likewise churn onward with a carbon currency, even though we know—in advance—that it will never count the world perfectly. But by circulating and storing it, we will at least be able to finally account for our actions—both past and present.

The reports from every single meeting of global leaders attests, time and again, that they keep refusing to account for this cosmic theft on our behalf. Continuing to wait for them to solve this problem for us feels hopeless. A carbon currency, on the other hand, feels hopeful, by offering us the possibility of bypassing those leaders, corporations, and institutional structures that are so clearly standing in the way of repair and repayment.

THE SEEDS ARE ALREADY SOWN

We believe all the mechanisms to jumpstart this vast accounting project—this vast payback, this vast movement of atmospheric debits to terrestrial credits—are already in place. Many disparate and energetic projects around the world are already attempting to solve either a climate crisis or a currency crisis. There are projects to certify farmers’ carbon sequestration; there are innumerable experts all building careers in how to “draw down” carbon; there are new monetary theories gaining respect in mainstream economics discussions; there are new tools for measuring carbon content; there are new digital platforms for cooperatively minded citizens; there are an ever-expanding number of local-currency advocates; there are newly awakened activists. Lastly, there are even growing carbon markets, which, despite their many scandalous flaws, could still play a role in our carbon banks, since throughout human history, commodification has always been an elemental step in decommodification.⁴ Indeed, there are so many thriving, dedicated, and passionate “doers” out there already that we cannot possibly catalog them all here.

All that is needed, we believe, is a currency and banking system to knit together these many efforts, helping to make these numbers circulate and thereby gain meaning to billions of potential users. By tethering them to one another, all these currently separated projects would become conjoined in an intricately woven web, all dedicated to drawing atmospheric carbon out of the sky by building trust in a new digital currency. And as we all know, webs create internal tension that only makes them stronger.

Constantly verifying its capacity to measure that which we value most dearly— carbon, our global inalienable possession that we share with the more-than-human world—would lie at the heart of the potential success of a carbon currency. Just like all currencies, its built-in inability to perfectly measure will be generative of the social and economic world that will be necessary to draw down atmospheric carbon. Its reach will necessarily exceed its grasp, but the striving to always close this gap fuels the project itself, while also bringing us into communion with the more-than-human world from which we plundered. Thus, a carbon-backed currency could help sew together the work of everyday nonprofit verifiers who are already heavily engaged in this debate, laboring hard to quantify carbon drawdown.

If a dense web of private and public concerns that were supposed to verify such projects has failed us, we can build new ones, rather than screaming into the void about how governmental regulation must be tightened, or how private actors must start to behave more ethically. Like so much else in the neoliberal era, the cynicism concerning both greenwashing and digital currencies emanates from the fact that we have handed over the verification of these projects to for-profit concerns. And many of us even suspect that these same concerns long ago captured state and global regulatory systems (and the trust they were supposed to inspire). But no verification regime is preordained or written in the stars. Hearkening back to our forest metaphor from chapter 1, we must—ourselves, as everyday global citizens—become part of the “forest” ecology of the drawdown effort, rather than just sit on the sidelines and watch it unfold, hoping for a deus ex machina from governments or corporate capitalism to save us.

If we follow this forest metaphor further, we stand currently indicted as freeloading harvesters of the labors that nonprofit ecological verifiers are already doing. If, instead, we add a carbon currency to verification systems already in place, we become an integral part of these nonprofit verification regimes. By joining ourselves to the work already afoot, our millions of transactions—all directed toward sequestration—become like the millions of raindrops falling on a forest ecosystem; each one on its own has no value to the system, but conjoined, they give it an additional burst of life.

Given this context, a currency that purports to aid in the net-sequestration of carbon must be able to prove it every minute of every day. To do so, there must be a nonprofit platform army of “verifiers” who zealously ensure that each issued Cord represents net-sequestered carbon. Just like a regular cooperative, our proposed commons-based carbon banks would necessarily employ a steady work force, but they will also rely on a rotating group of depositor-volunteers. In exchange for their efforts, they could also accrue benefits from their local carbon banks, such as a lower interest rate for loans or a higher interest rate for their savings account.

But far beyond such potential incentives, a linchpin claim of our idea is that a cooperatively owned banking system might feel less like “work” than like a passion that one is eager to pursue. A commons carbon bank in a local neighborhood would bring together like-minded people who will be excited to join this communal labor, just as they enjoy laboring for other civic and religious organizations. If we again return to our point (from chapter 1) that the “work of banks” has often dovetailed with the “work of temples” throughout human history, then this idea is not so far-fetched. One of the blockbuster books of social science of the last fifty years was Putnam’s Bowling Alone (2021), which revealed, among other things, a decline in church membership. Many people (not everyone, and that’s OK) are searching for ways to transcend the sense of alienation that Putnam documented, and they are therefore still yearning to find common projects to work on in the wake of these declines in membership in civic and religious organizations.

Far away from religion, Wikipedia—another voluntary and platform-based verification regime—offers an inspiring model in this regard. While we often quickly roll our eyes at the latest greenwashing or digital-currency scheme, very few people roll their eyes at a Wikipedia entry anymore. What are the underpinnings—both pragmatic and epistemological—that have allowed Wikipedia to so quickly become a vaunted “verifier” of our world, and in an astounding number of languages to boot?⁵ What tactics has it relied on to build its vivacious sense of pride and community in its project? If we could take inspiration from its ongoing and crowdsourced pursuit of the truth, could we combat the built-in cynicism that a carbon currency would surely confront?

Among many other things, Wikipedia is a living, breathing threat to capitalist ideology (not to capitalism itself). Since at least Adam Smith, we have been told that humanity is dangerously “indolent”; that is, we are “naturally” lazy. Even the myth of Adam and Eve in the Garden is predicated on the idea that we will only work out of necessity, once we are cast out of utopian abundance and must “eat by the sweat of our brow.” Smith and his many followers since have argued that people only work under threat of lack, never for joy.⁶

And yet Wikipedia produces its millions of global pages in countless languages by way of the free, unremunerated, volunteer labor of its verifiers. Notably, Wikipedia’s primary English-language competitors—Encyclopedia Britannica and World Book—have conscripted armies working for pay, and the two encyclopedias themselves are profit-seeking (Arazy, Nov, and Ortega 2014). And yet, contrary to everything we hear about the nonprofit sector’s built-in “inefficiency,” both Britannica and World Book today cower under the merciless onslaught of Wikipedia’s volunteer army.

A famous episode from the early history of Wikipedia clarifies just how toxic the profit motive can be to galvanizing the free labor of these untold millions. As recounted by Tkacz (2015, 150–151), Larry Sanger, a cofounder of Wikipedia, had sent out a missive in 2002 to his platform army that mentioned in passing the possibility that Wikipedia might start selling ads to cover the salaries of its leaders. This prompted a vitriolic response from the Spanish flank of the Wikipedia army, which closed out a mutinous letter with the words, “Good luck with your wikiPAIDia.” Tkacz then informs us that, within two weeks of this letter being sent, “the majority of the Spanish contingent abandoned the Spanish Wikipedia,” pulling their unpaid labor from the global project like so many deserting soldiers.

Tkacz informs us that this stands as a pivotal moment in the evolution of Wikipedia. After the loss of the Spanish battalion, Wikipedia’s leaders backed off and then built the Wikipedia we know today, which is supported by donations and not ads. The Spanish episode clarifies two intertwined general principles. First, like the sacred, the truth should not be for sale. Following from this, the public becomes suspicious of the nature of truth itself whenever it appears to be bought and sold. If Wikipedia’s volunteer army and its millions of readers perceived that its efforts were infected by the profit motive, its ongoing “war” to provide truth to the world would be lost.⁷ Instead, it exists in a global commons (see Bollier 2009; Buck 2017; Global Commons Alliance n.d.; Shaffer 2012), where people fight every day to maintain the communal value that it produces and upon which many of us now rely.

Considering the way in which for-profit motives can destroy truth-seeking efforts, the first axiom of a carbon-banking system must be that the carbon banks cannot be owned by individuals or entities seeking profit. Instead, they must be owned by the community, whose collective goal is to unabashedly sequester carbon. To do so, the bank itself should at least break even (though this could be achieved via donations rather than profit), but its central purpose cannot be to make money.

While many might see cooperatively owned banks as the most utopian element of our overall proposal, we counter with the robust history of (and ongoing reliance upon) credit unions and cooperative financial institutions.⁸ But further, this fits with our understanding of the commons as described in chapters 1 and 4: The commons has always needed to be vigorously defended from forces that would privatize it. Profit-seeking enterprises can—and do—flourish around and through commons, but as soon as they plunder the commons itself, profit as such becomes threatened.⁹

A platform “army” to defend this commons is an apt metaphor, because we should not be ignorant of the structure and functioning of Wikipedia. In chapter 1, we argued that forests are the dialectical transcendence of both hierarchical and egalitarian tendencies. That is, they are neither purely vertical nor purely horizontal. They thrive because of the interplay of both of these forces. Likewise, armies require a strong sense of horizontal belonging and dedication, but they also need an organizational hierarchy. If the hierarchy is too brutal or corrupt, the horizontal commitment evaporates, just as no amount of horizontal commitment will succeed without a bureaucratic hierarchy that directs it. The world’s largest worker-owned cooperative—Mondragon in Spain—knows this well. Despite its well-known mission and identity, it does not eschew the very notion of leadership itself. A vast interplay of workers, consumers, and management all strive together to realize the project of a cooperatively owned enterprise.¹⁰ Similar models can be found by investigating the ways in which Quakers seek to govern their communities worldwide; steward-leaders, for example, rotate through responsibilities over the course of their lives. Vast consumer-led cooperatives have been thriving for centuries and also attest to this combination of egalitarian and hierarchical principles, as does the recent blossoming of “platform cooperativism” (see Schneider 2018; Scholz 2016 and 2023).¹¹

A carbon-banking system would be no different. The successful commons that have been studied the world over share this organizational structure and commitment. Once again turning to the work of Standing (2019), the commons is typically comprised of commoners, gatekeepers, and stewards. All must be tightly intermeshed and tightly committed to the same central goal of tending to the commons. Sometimes the relationships feel egalitarian, and sometimes they feel hierarchical; people can cycle in and out of positions within this framework.

We might say that all of the roles and general principles, when combined, will sustain not only a commons but a common culture as well. Because a culture has flourished, much of the work of tending to a commons becomes ritualistic rather than remunerative. What can be viewed as drudgery if done in exchange for a wage becomes beautiful “sacrificial” work on behalf of the community (or, in the language of our first chapter, a mitzvah, which has more joyous connotations than “sacrifice”). We all know this well, just by quickly surveying history. Perhaps most famously, Gandhi convinced millions of Indians to return to the hard work and drudgery of handlooming as a tactic of denying the British income from the purchase of their industrial textiles. But we also know this to be true because we all—at least occasionally—volunteer in our own communities. For example, many people would feel entirely differently about mopping the floor of their church than they would about mopping their employer’s floor. This completely harmonizes with our ongoing comparison with Wikipedia: Andrew Lih informs us that “Wikipedia survives and retains its passionate community also because it is social” (2009, 7).

Kimmerer refers to this as building a “culture of gratitude,” which must always simultaneously be a “culture of reciprocity.” Taking inspiration from the Onondaga Thanksgiving Address, she argues that one of the central insights that it teaches is that “gifts and responsibilities are one.” She then offers an example of this powerful dovetailing and how it inspires her to labor on behalf of her family:

It’s such a simple thing, but we all know the power of gratitude to incite a cycle of reciprocity. If my girls run out the door with lunch in hand without a “Thanks, Mama!” I confess I get to feeling a tad miserly with my time and energy. But when I get a hug of appreciation, I want to stay up late to bake cookies for tomorrow’s lunch bag. We know that appreciation begets abundance. Why should it not be so for Mother Earth, who packs us a lunch every single day? (Kimmerer 2013, 115–116; emphasis ours)

Felicitously, Kimmerer’s focus on the interrelation between gratitude and reciprocity describes a central finding of anthropology over its century-plus of research. In contradistinction to economists, anthropologists have frequently highlighted the exchange of gifts over the exchange of commodities, arguing that the former offer unique insights into the building and nurturing of community ties. Unlike buying toothpaste at the corner store, a gift entails a sense of care toward the recipient. In other words, gifts and responsibility go hand in hand.

At least two elements of the gift-versus-commodity distinction are helpful for thinking through the labor needed to nurture and sustain a local carbon bank. First, gifts create lasting bonds through time, precisely because they require a return gift that (typically) cannot be returned immediately; this return gift often must be bigger than its forebear, thus causing gift exchange to mimic, surprisingly, more standard credit/debt relationships. In this manner, the total value of gifts in the system can spiral upward, thereby growing both the bank’s resources and the commitments that the depositor-volunteers make to it. Secondly, the most famous text on the exchange of gifts, Marcel Mauss’s The Gift, homes in on the fact that the circulation of gifts always tempers self-interest with altruism; in joining the reciprocity of gifting, one is allowed to expect bigger and bigger returns, but only if one offers bigger and bigger gifts oneself. As the famous example of the potlatch shows, a cycle of gifting can be a machine for killing individual accumulation (Mauss 1990). The structure of gifting, in other words, harmonizes with the management structure of the commons, which tethers the spirit of individual self-interest to the communal needs of preserving the inalienable possession.

Despite all this potential for individual expenditure (in the form of labor) on behalf of a local carbon bank, it behooves a well-run commons to recognize that such “ritualistic” free labor can easily be a double-edged sword. Mopping the floor of a local church is essential labor, but any good church deacon knows that the person doing the mopping will come and go, answering to new and exciting callings throughout their own life cycle. That is, unlike a for-hire janitor, the deacon cannot rely on the same person to mop, but they can rely on the community to mop. We cannot be bitter when a sense of responsibility calls someone away from mopping; we must recognize that their gifts to the community lie elsewhere at this moment—they may return to mopping someday, or they may offer their services to the community in new and unforeseen ways. If they have abandoned the church altogether, that should be cause for introspection rather than anger.

Given this inherent volatility of gifted labor, all the tasks that the community deems “system-critical” likely need to be remunerated, though not with grand salaries. The church deacon, for example, is likely to be a paid job because it requires a full-time commitment, and because it is too important to leave to the arrhythmic nature of volunteer labor. The “recording clerks” of early Quakerism are a telling example of this practice, made by a community of people seeking to regulate a sacred commons. Early Quakers were being seized by English authorities and tossed in jail for heresy and other related crimes. Consequently, Quaker children were being left parentless for stretches of time. To guarantee their safety and to carefully track the whereabouts of these children, now under “the care of the meeting,” it was decided that recording clerks should be the first remunerated post within the Society of Friends. It was simply too system-critical to leave to the beautiful but mercurial nature of volunteer work.

If we do not expect the government or corporations to maintain our holiest and most vital community spaces, perhaps it is long past due that we recognize that they have utterly failed to maintain the health of our planet. Instead, for those of us who deem the earth sacred, we can convert the drudgery of verifying carbon drawdown into ritualistic labor on behalf of all that is holy. Some of us will cycle through volunteer modalities of this collective work, while some of us will cycle through remunerated modalities of it, as we are so called. A robust commons can nimbly tolerate this sort of coming and going of different types of communal work, just as it can find new callings for people who seek to contribute to it.

FORTIFICATION AND MATÉRIEL

If a volunteer army mustered¹² to defend the Carbon Commons, it would require forts, proving grounds, and assorted weaponry to produce and protect the solidified carbon that it seeks to sequester and defend. The banks, as should be clear by now, would stand as the fortifications of the system, nodally connected to one another through a carbon-backed currency and the ledgers that track its movement. Inside each bank, there would be a pyrolyzer, as well as teams of accountants and assayers (e.g., ecologists and soil scientists).

The assayers’ task would require expertise and the development of wisdom about how to best measure carbon sequestration. Some of this work would involve pyrolysis, but as the banking system developed, assayers would also need to go out “into the field” to assay carbon-sequestration projects outside the bank (as described in chapter 6). As a result of all this necessary work, carbon banks would likely have more soil scientists on staff than finance wizards.

Thankfully, at this very moment, tools are already being developed for this kind of work, whether we are talking about the Regen Network, Forest Metrix, or even the for-profit work of firms such as Indigo Agriculture. The nonprofit International Biochar Initiative and the European Biochar Certificate (see International Biochar Initiative n.d.) have both already begun the hard work of setting standards for the global community of biochar sequesterers. All of this extensive expertise and technology could be harnessed and deployed by the carbon banks in their ongoing verification efforts.

Most of the funding for these efforts would be provided by depositors, who would themselves become part of the fabric of ongoing verification. Additional funding could come not only from philanthropists (as was the case with the nineteenth-century savings bank revolution described in chapter 4) but also from underutilized governmental funds, such as the many extant grants to transform brownfields (similar in spirit to the Italian governmental program described by Rakopoulos 2017, which transfers seized mafia property to local cooperatives). For example, many carbon banks might optimally be placed at abandoned gas stations. Not only would this mimic past society-wide transformations that often follow a “sacred geography,”¹³ but it could stand as a physical incarnation of the transformation that is sought, by healing land that was ravaged by the fossil fuel economy.

Because this verification work—undertaken by all the stakeholders in the carbon-banking system—is subject to the standard pitfalls of quantification, it requires both a volunteer army and some form of democratic leadership to keep it honest. We want to reemphasize how this is no different from standard banking, which also must “verify itself” in some fashion every day. Whether we look to the twentieth-century “fractional reserve” system, take inspiration from the era of the gold standard (when depositors played a larger role than they do today), or follow the tactics of many cooperative banks of Europe, there is no need to reinvent the wheel. Without intending to constrain future community imagination about various possible verification regimes, we offer some models here simply to show that the task is far from impossible.

For starters, there are the “accreditation” systems that govern American higher education. In this peer-review model, a university assays its own education and its delivery, but then this assay is subjected to intense scrutiny by a team of experts hailing from competing universities. The resulting assay serves as a sort of “licensing” agreement, wherein the course credits that a properly assayed university offers can be accepted by all other universities assayed by the same nonprofit accreditation agency. In like manner, we could readily imagine teams of volunteers who serve on time-delimited rotations, traveling to various carbon banks to ensure that they are accurately quantifying their carbon sequestration. These visits might include spot-checks of new sequestration projects off-site, which means that people asking for Cord credits for their own sequestration projects (as described in chapter 5) would always agree, prior to taking any loan, that their project might be assayed by an outside party without advance notice.¹⁴ Such a system works best, we believe, if the visiting team of assayers come from farther away and have little connection to the banks they are assaying in a given area.

Another model would again take inspiration from Wikipedia.¹⁵ A given bank’s books could be entirely transparent, allowing anyone and everyone to constantly subject them to scrutiny. Debates would emerge in background fora, where experts could argue about the truth of sequestration claims. Offsite visits are harder to imagine in this model, but investigative journalism provides a model, wherein concerned local citizens can dig a bit deeper into a given offsite sequestration project. If the muckraker gathers enough evidence and suspicions gain enough traction in the community, they could contact the bank’s compliance officer; in order to avoid a run on the bank’s deposits, it would then behoove the bank to make a visit to the site itself, in accordance with whatever agreement had been reached at the time of the loan or deposit. The complete transparency of this model might scare some—how many of us want our community to know exactly how much is in our bank account? But the Swiss banking system provides a ready solution, allowing all accounts to preserve their privacy by using numerical coding rather than standard naming conventions; statistics bureaus the world over do the same when they publish microdata. Any outside assayers would only see the bare numbers, and they would never have the ability to attach them to given names. In many ways, this is the system already in place for bitcoin and other digital currencies, which also rely on extreme and deeply interlinked peer-to-peer transparency via a so-called “distributed ledger,” while still retaining a powerful degree of anonymity.

Another model jumps off from a fascinating example detailed in Hoffman, Postel-Vinay, and Rosenthal’s book, Dark Matter Credit (2019). In that text, the authors describe a vast peer-to-peer lending system that existed for centuries in France prior to the spread of banking itself. Organized mostly around “notaries” in villages across the land, the supply and demand of money managed to find an equilibrium price through the legal documents and physical labors of these highly trusted notaries. In a similar fashion, our banking system might allow a new industry to sprout upon the ground that it provides, in the form of such “notaries.” The truthfulness of these actors would be constantly under assessment by all related parties—creditors, debtors, and depositors. As a result, their own livelihoods would be tied to guaranteeing sequestration.¹⁶

Finally, central banking provides a go-to and well established tactic for monitoring local carbon banks. In this model, the nodally connected “forts” all report to a headquarters, whose task it is to ensure that they are sound and prepared for any potential crisis. Central banks (and in the United States, also the Treasury) monitor their national banking systems with an impressive array of powers and techniques, ranging from reporting demands, licensing agreements, and even by simply ensuring that robust communication occurs across the banking system, thereby further strengthening the internal tension that holds this web together. In a more commons-based system, power should insistently flow each way; this would entail such things as rotational selection for service at the central bank, more frequent regional committee meetings that inform less frequent national committee meetings, and a general sense that people are opting into the central-banking licensing and monitoring system because its guidelines strengthen local banks rather than control them. There is no natural law demanding that a central bank must exist, and there may be reasons to avoid them in a commons-based carbon-banking system. But often they “evolve” out of the private-banking sector rather than simply out of the brute force of national legislation, as the Dutch one did, for example. In the nineteenth century, due to certain market forces, it ended up serving as the monitor of the many Dutch cooperative banks that were then proliferating across much of Europe (see Jonker 1996).

Other models are surely possible, and we cannot imagine all of them in advance. Suffice it to say that humanity has tackled the thorny question of assaying many times over, and often with far less tools than are available today. It was done successfully during the gold standard era and even during the heights of America’s brutal Civil War.¹⁷ Today, we do it every day across a variety of fields (e.g., Wikipedia, as described above, or even when the qualities of the various COVID vaccines were judged). Measurements will sometimes prove inaccurate; we will occasionally discover that projects are sequestering more or less carbon than they promised. Based on all this verification work, the system might even develop a publicly available comparative database for banks, allowing potential depositors to find the ones that most reliably sequester carbon.

With a robust system in place, however it may function, the banks themselves—as a whole—would be stable and protected against fraud, thereby guaranteeing sound currencies. These currencies, and their attendant banks, will then be contributing to the crucial drawdown of carbon from the atmosphere while also uniting an otherwise dispersed community of people who care deeply about this issue but currently have no way of contributing to a solution. Through the debates enabled by daily currency usage, this volunteer army will learn as it goes, gradually pushing its way forward to a series of best practices for monitoring (and adding to) sequestration. Practice makes perfect.

As already noted, all of this exuberant but taxing labor of quantifying and verifying sequestration must emanate out of a shared sense of ownership and a de-emphasis on the profit motive. At first blush, a bank seems like a weird place to seek out these twin sensibilities. But there exists no iron law that a bank cannot be owned and governed by a local community rather than a team of capitalists or a corporation. We therefore propose a simple articulation of Ostrom’s hard-won wisdom: Our banks should have stewards (bank managers), gatekeepers (assayers and notaries), and commoners (depositors), all co-owning the bank inside a Carbon Commons. Following already extant laws designed to regulate cooperatives, each of these groups could own shares in the local carbon bank. Not only could they all attend governance meetings, but they could also periodically monitor the truthfulness and success of the bank itself. But on a daily basis, the commoners themselves would also monitor the bank, always ready to withdraw their money and cast the bank into financial peril if it deviates from the task that these same commoners have appointed to it.

ENEMIES AT THE GATES

We cannot pretend to catalog all the possible ways in which sequestration fraud might undermine a given carbon bank or even the entire carbon banking system. On the whole, we believe that the combined passion and dire need to address climate change will trigger humanity’s well-established ingenuity. The Carbon Commons will be defended because it must be defended. We have learned that the cavalry is not coming in the form of governments or corporations, so we must all rise up to build collective institutions that can find a sound and sane way to sequester without these traditional partners. Still, we cannot be naive—bad actors always emerge, even in desperate scenarios where one would love to imagine that they would not.

Here—solely to counter pessimism and not to soothsay—we will try to show how the most obvious threats to a carbon currency can be successfully parried by the Carbon Commons that will govern, nurture, and sustain it.

The unnecessary and greedy harvesting of extant carbon sequestration stands as the most obvious danger (indeed, it has already emerged in the “biofuels” movement). In order to get their hands on Cords, a forest owner could—theoretically—pyrolyze their trees in order to monetize them. We have mentioned some techniques to combat this in chapter 5, when we discussed the importance of integrating “know your customer” (KYC) tactics into the carbon-banking system; we also noted that a forest owner could gain more money from the bank by offering an easement, thereby allowing the bank to “outsource” the storage of carbon to the forest, where it would stay in the living trees.

Beyond these two tactics, we can also turn to the ever-evolving wisdom about quantifying carbon itself in order to protect against this sort of behavior. To wit, anyone who brings biomass to a local bank for pyrolyzation will have already followed the KYC process, thereby registering the origin of the biomass. And because of improving measurement techniques, our assayers and accountants will know approximately how much annual waste feedstock could be produced by a given acreage within the bank’s geographic ambit. If a depositor brings in far more than is feasible given the land’s size, the bank could reject the feedstock as fraudulent. Furthermore, our assayers would be expected to inspect feedstock prior to pyrolysis. A diseased tree could be brought to the bank, but a healthy one would raise the assayer’s eyebrow, causing additional questions to follow. If depositors discovered that such aberrations were somehow going unnoticed by their bank’s assayers, they would likely find a new bank—not only because they are dedicated to carbon sequestration as a project, but also because they would fear that they were themselves holding the bank’s unsound currency.

Other examples of threats to the soundness of the currency could be addressed by the passionate labor of our depositors, as described above. They would expect conflicts of interest to be addressed by establishing a system for “assaying the assayers,” just as they would know that the bank’s management would be conservative about issuing loans to riskier projects that were overpromising the amount of carbon they could sequester. Gradually, communal standards would emerge and be shared across the entire carbon-banking ecosystem, as different local banking communities entered into a period of co-discovery about how to best sequester and monitor carbon.

The premier threat to a carbon currency, however, comes not so much from bad actors as from the looming threat of overissuance. We will discuss this in detail in chapter 8, where we consider the seeming abundance of carbon and the systemic threats such abundance could cause. Adding to that discussion here, we can focus on the narrower way in which a faulty verification regime could cause overissuance. For example, a loan “gone bad” (issued to someone who promised to sequester x tons of carbon but only managed to sequester x − 1 tons) would theoretically mean there were too many chits sloshing around in the system. These chits would parade about as if they represented sequestered carbon, but in reality our verifiers would have discovered, after the fact, that they did not.

Two responses come to mind—one orthodox and one heterodox. The conservative answer to this threat is no different than the threat it poses to standard monetary systems—bad loans happen all the time, without thereby undermining the entire system. On a drawn-out time scale, bad loans do not pose a threat because they are outweighed by good loans; a good banker will balance risks and retire bad loans over long time horizons, while the interest rate reflects the banker’s understanding that, systemically, some loans will represent awful investments.

The more radical response to this question comes from the study of counterfeiting. By definition, counterfeiting means that there is currency running through the system that is not duly represented as a liability at a bank somewhere in the “chain of promises” (see chapter 2). And yet a moderate amount of counterfeiting does not necessarily threaten a currency, as clearly attested by the sheer number of counterfeit US dollars circulating around the globe today. In some cases—for example, in early America (see Scott 2000)—counterfeiting responds (not morally, but technically) to the fact that the supply of money is not meeting the demand for it.

We are, of course, not proposing that a carbon-banking system should be riddled with bad loans and counterfeit money. We are merely pointing out that fearmongering about these issues, when it comes to the question of verifying carbon sequestration, should not be used to dismiss the entire proposal. Considering our ongoing analogy with Wikipedia, this would be the equivalent of arguing that Wikipedia should have never gotten off the ground, simply because many (many!) erroneous pages marred its early years (and still do).¹⁸ Finding the truth is not a static, one-off operation; it is a path riddled with dangerous falsehoods that unfolds in front of the seeker. Rather than threatening the truth, therefore, room for error emerges as part of the dialectical journey in the search for truth. The vigorous debates that would ensue about the truthfulness of sequestration would—while verifying—also be doing their part to build the community itself. As we argued at the outset of this chapter, the apparent “failings” of currency to perfectly measure the world may, in fact, be precisely what makes it function so well.

GUERRILLA INSURRECTIONS

We have been at pains to voice our frustration with governments and corporations throughout this book, because they have failed to deliver us from the climate threat. Given the short remaining time horizon for salvaging a habitable planet, we must, tragically, move away from these bad actors and find a new method. Verification stands at the heart of our loss of faith. So many people on the planet rely on governments to verify the safety or quality of specific goods and services vital to our lives, such as clean water, safe medicines, and competent teachers. Corporations do something similar with their branding, offering us trust that the orange juice we are drinking truly comes from … oranges. The list goes on.

But governments and corporations have been manifestly untruthful about our climate catastrophe. We need not establish whether this is the result of malfeasance or misinformation; all we need to know is that they have failed and that we need to stop relying on them. Too many climate goals that we have missed were insufficient to begin with; too many purported “offsets” were but moneymaking scams. All of this untruthfulness has bred contempt for these institutions—and worse still, a sense of hopelessness.

The biggest untruth of all has been the ongoing privatization of terrestrial carbon by governments and corporations, that is, licenses to drill. For well over a century, our language and laws have told us that fossil fuels are all-too-cheap for the taking, with not nearly enough attendant costs to keep them from flooding the atmosphere. We now know that carbon is the stuff of life and should have always remained in the commons.¹⁹ After centuries of this rank seizure, the task of humanity must be to move it back into a new commons—to make it sacred once again.

One solution, as we have suggested over and over again in this book, is for us to seize power over this issue. In the field of verification, we have cause for hope, because everyday people rely on community verification regimes that have little to do with governments or corporations. We have already discussed Wikipedia, but there are many other examples; aside from the university accreditation system we mentioned above, there is language itself, which is an ongoing anarchic experiment in “verifying” the world. If a child points at a cat and says “dog,” we gently correct her, setting in motion the verification regime known as language, which strives to attach words with things (whether abstract or concrete is no matter). In Tina Fey’s classic movie Mean Girls, one of the “Plastics” keeps trying to circulate a new slang word, “fetch,” but she consistently fails—it never convincingly attaches itself to any object, so her surrounding community of shared language users never trust it; contrariwise, new slang words that succeed do so because people accept them as truthful (even if they are not objectively so).²⁰

To ensure that solidified carbon is truly sequestered, without relying on governments or corporations, we must draw inspiration and hope from these same sorts of tactics in order to monitor our own redemption of our tremendous carbon debt. If we succeed, then governments will surely come in and try to overtake the community-built verification regime, just as the movement to nationalize currencies (and even languages, in some instances) did in the nineteenth century. We may choose to welcome this as a “good problem to have,” celebrating that our efforts to claim our own control over the climate fight have finally forced governments to join the fight themselves in a meaningful way. Regardless, such an outcome is a problem for another day—a problem that will likely emerge only if we claim control over verification in the first place.

NOTES

1. Importantly, this is only oil, and does not include natural gas or coal, nor other carbon deposits that we have raided such as soils and limestone. The number comes from the Hamburg-based nonprofit World Ocean Review, which has no immediately apparent conflicts of interest (see World Ocean Review n.d.). Additionally, the earth absorbs a significant amount of CO₂ that results from the burning of fossil fuels, so there’s not a one-to-one correlation between the amount of oil burned and the amount of CO₂ emitted into the atmosphere. Since the industrial era began, it is estimated that over two thousand gigatons of CO₂ have been added to the atmosphere (see, Frumhoff 2014; Global Carbon Project n.d.; Scharf 2017). The IPCC website is also considered a reliable source for finding data on this issue (https://www.ipcc.ch/data).

Excellent research on all these matters can be found at such places as The Global Carbon Project, 2021, https://www.globalcarbonproject.org/index.htm; and U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, “Greenhouse Gases Equivalencies Calculator—Calculations and References,” May 17, 2024, https://www.epa.gov/energy/greenhouse-gases-equivalencies-calculator-calculations-and-references. The Global Carbon Project has also assembled a number of helpful videos (https://globalcarbonbudget.org). Scientific American and the Union of Concerned Scientists have also summarized these matters (though from a number of years ago): Caleb A. Scharf, “The Crazy Scale of Human Carbon Emission,” Scientific American, April 26, 2017, https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/life-unbounded/the-crazy-scale-of-human-carbon-emission; and Peter Frumhoff, “Global Warming Fact: More than Half of All Industrial CO₂ Pollution Has Been Emitted Since 1988,” Union of Concerned Scientists, The Equation (blog), December 15, 2014, https://blog.ucsusa.org/peter-frumhoff/global-warming-fact-co2-emissions-since-1988-764.

2. Many critiques of accounting practices have elucidated this gap between the “real world” and our quantitative representations of it (e.g., Birch and Muniesa 2020; Callon and Law 2005; Mazzucato 2018; Ortiz 2021; Power 1997; Shapin 1994).

3. People on the left with anti-money stances will quickly point out that the imbalance in access to money gives corporations and billionaires too much power in this daily debate that helps to build the world. We agree, which is why we outline both in this chapter and in chapter 4 how banks must not only be cooperatively owned but also be prepared to fend off attempts to privatize them. Again, the operative metaphor for our proposal is judo—rather than fruitlessly trying to circumscribe the strength of your opponent, redirect their power and make it your own.

4. We indicated our differences with carbon markets in chapter 1. But again, simply because something is imperfect or scandalously broken today, it does not mean that we cannot learn from, and perhaps even leverage, its experience.

5. Swedish Wikipedia ranks fourth in total articles, despite having only eleven million speakers; Hawaiian Wikipedia has thousands of articles, despite being a language with only two thousand speakers. Such numbers bespeak the commitment of free labor hours by the community of users, though of course there are also “bots” that lend a hand (and now, increasingly, AI).

6. Peebles (2011) explores Smith’s thinking on this front more thoroughly. Graeber’s (2018) discursus on “bullshit jobs” also challenges this idea that people will only labor under some threat of lack. In the US political context, this is a well-known backdrop to all debates about unemployment benefits.

7. Calling it a “war” may sound too dramatic, but Wikipedia has already spawned alternative platforms from cultural forces that aim for a more hierarchical understanding of knowledge production. See, e.g., Alexis Sobel Fitts, “Welcome to the Wikipedia of the Alt-Right,” Wired, June 21, 2017, https://www.wired.com/story/welcome-to-the-wikipedia-of-the-alt-right/; and Chicago Tribune, “Online Conservapedia Pitched as Conservative Alternative to Wikipedia,” August 21, 2021, https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-2007-04-03-0704030228-story.html.

8. A review of these institutions cannot delay us here, but see, for example, Birchall 2013; Boscia et al. 2010; Groeneveld 2016; Guinnane 2001; McKillop et. al 2020; Schneider 2018.

9. Perhaps the appearance of “fake news” presents an analogous case. As Americans become increasingly suspicious of the social production of truth, American society itself feels as though it is breaking apart. Moreover, people seek to fill this new void with crowd-sourced news and rely on unpaid local reporters on X (formerly Twitter) who can tell us about power outages and murders that have been neglected by the local press.

10. While Kasmir’s (1996) book is critical of Mondragon’s cooperative model, she still does an excellent job of describing it in action.

11. A clearinghouse of data on the current cooperative movement can be found at the World Cooperative Monitor (https://monitor.coop/en), while a hub for platform cooperativism can be found at the Platform Cooperative Consortium (https://platform.coop). Rakopoulos (2017) provides us with a fascinating ethnography of an Italian project to repurpose seized mafia property as cooperatively owned land. As for the Quaker example, their governance practices have not been studied in any academic texts, to our knowledge, but there are many websites that provide explanations of how Quakers conduct the business of their communities (search “Quaker meeting with a concern for business”). In passing, it is worth noting that one group of Quakers in Britain have proposed building a bank based on Quaker principles; see John Lovatt and Timothy Phillips, “A Quaker Bank,” The Friend, January 25, 2013, https://thefriend.org/article/a-quaker-bank.

12. The military metaphor is a bit depressing, but considering that money has often been considered a stand-in for other forms of territorial acquisition, hopefully this metaphor is still helpful in describing the carbon-banking infrastructure and the labor and technology that would be needed to support it.

13. As the periodic conflagrations at the Temple Mount in Jerusalem so clearly reveal, often societies choose to place new “temples” on top of the ones that previously lorded over a territory. In this analogy, gas stations are today’s temples, dedicated to daily rituals of respect and genuflection directed toward fossil fuels.

14. Such practices are already widespread in many industries, e.g., “compliance officers” and “fisheries observer.”

15. Wikipedia has spawned scholarly literature studying its organizational structure and methods. Tkacz’s book looms large, but many others have dug into these matters, such as Benkler 2006; Burke 2012; Lih 2009; Lovink and Tkacz 2011; Reagle and Koerner 2020; and an important paper by Arazy, Nov, and Ortega 2014. Discussions of Wikipedia’s ongoing search for truth pop up with a degree of frequency, revealing that the project is evolving and still searching for best practices. A recent debate about how to describe unconvicted sexual predators—including Michel Foucault—is quite instructive in this regard (see Dr. Emeline Brulé [@e_mln_e], “A thread on how Wikipedia editors handle allegations of sexual abuse,” Twitter [now X], April 1, 2021, https://twitter.com/e_mln_e/status/1377808773671047168?s=21).

16. On a side note, Dark Matter Credit also illuminates the need for credit provisioning, even among the many people outside the banking system. In a world where we desperately need passionate farmers and innovators to sequester more carbon, our banks could come to the fore, offering credit that might not be forthcoming from more standard banks. In the process, they might well offer salvation to smaller farmers who are otherwise at risk of not being able to afford the transition to regenerative agriculture. Helping farmers ignored by for-profit banks was also one of the central roles of the European cooperative banks of the nineteenth century.

17. “In regulations intended to keep their assets highly liquid, federal institutions were prohibited from investing in or holding mortgages on real estate aside from property necessary for them to conduct their business. Furthermore, federal regulations governed their organization and capital structure and Treasury examiners required regular reports on financial condition and inspected bank records on the premises” (Bensel 1990, 287).

18. Trawling the hinterlands of Wikipedia is by far the best place to find entries containing clearly false statements. Because fewer people visit these pages, they are verified less frequently by observers and editors, which is why you can find the statement that “four hundred thirty years later, to the day, Moses led the Israelites out of Egypt” on its page dedicated to the Land of Goshen (emphasis added; accessed November 1, 2021; excised by time of next visit, on January 31, 2024, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_of_Goshen). While it does not focus on falsehoods within Wikipedia entries, the Twitter (now X) handle “Depths of Wikipedia” (@depthsofwiki) offers much entertaining fodder for this discussion.

19. See chapter 5 for a discussion of how our banks could also keep unmined carbon safely sequestered in its original natural vaults, never to be removed by humankind.

20. See Vico 1999 and White 2003. Satire and irony are important exceptions that prove the rule. The humor emerges out of the disconnect between language and what it purports to reflect.

7 DIGITAL DEMOCRATIZATION

Commons can be destroyed from above and may be defended by political action, but they cannot be built from above.

—Derek Wall, The Commons in History

COMEDIC CURRENCY

If, as described in chapter 2, cowrie shells can be the basis for an international monetary system, why not the far more regal Shibu Inu dog breed? In 2013, “Dogecoin” launched itself into the world as an ironic critique of the cryptocurrency craze. Intending to mock the countless millions who were hopping on board a bewildering efflorescence of cryptocurrencies, Dogecoin’s founders selected one of the most popular internet “memes” of the year, “Doge.” By seizing the Doge image as the insignia for their new currency, founders Billy Markus and Jackson Palmer were transparently signaling their belief that, in the world of crypto, things had gotten a bit … silly (Morris 2021).

The Doge meme, incidentally, produces its humor through not only the cute photo of the Shibu Inu but also the misspellings and malapropisms inevitably produced by translation from one language into another, which is a fitting homage to currency’s endless inability to precisely affix a perfect value to the world of objects. By nature, currency “mistranslates” the value of objects, thereby fomenting debate among buyers and sellers the world over. Arbitrageurs come in to clarify the “true” value of the object, but pricing nevertheless remains volatile. How appropriate, then, that Dogecoin has been notoriously volatile itself, though long-term owners of it have ultimately seen their initial purchase increase. Having begun in December 2013 worth $.00026 cents, it hit the 50-cent mark in May 2021 and had a total market capitalization of $54 billion dollars by June 2021. Attesting to its increased acceptance in the lived world outside of the internet, today one can purchase tickets to NBA basketball games and even a trip on a SpaceX rocket with Dogecoin (Morris 2021).

For our purposes, it is worthwhile to note that Dogecoin began in a spirit of mockery, but its apparent success is due to “viral culture.” The currency has been promoted by both TikTok and X (formerly Twitter) influencers, who are sometimes merely aiming to tweak the entire planet with a “joke” by increasing the value of this “joke” currency. Many social scientists have long known that satire can remake the political world (Bakhtin 1968; Mbembe 2001), but with Dogecoin, economists should now be alerted to this phenomenon as well.

But is viral culture, and its obvious intermingling with the world of consumption, really anything new? Already in the nineteenth century, a best-selling book was published that documented, as its title put it, “Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds” (1841). In that text, MacKay walks us through a variety of “manias and panics,” beginning his treatise with a study of the infamous “tulipmania” episode in seventeenth-century Amsterdam, wherein fragile tulips were traded at seemingly preposterous rates. Though his account is contested today, no one argues that a given commodity can “catch fire” and then spread throughout an entire economy, potentially distorting prices for other goods along the way.

REGULATING THE SPREAD OF CURRENCIES

Currencies are always introduced at some source point—typically, but not always, a bank. From there, they either spread throughout a given territory, if they are successful, or, if they are a failure, they are sent back to the source point as tawdry rejects. People either “adopt” a currency or they “reject” it; if successful, people “pass it along” to others, who in turn will need to pass it along to still more users (because accepting a currency in payment presupposes that others will also want it in the future).

Successful currencies typically proliferate in both number and form, to accommodate their increasing popularity. Through the private banking system, they increase in number by leveraging reserves into new loans, while the central bank can also issue new reserves. In the process, currencies create new versions of themselves as they travel. Central banks even have a tallying system for many (but not all of) the different variations of their currencies that exist: M0, MB, M1, M2, M3 are all measurements of money designed to capture specific types of currency. For example, M0 informs us only of the total amount of central bank-issued notes and coins in circulation, whereas M1 covers that, plus privately-held deposits and even traveler’s checks (i.e., types of money that could be rapidly and legally converted to the notes and coins issued by a central bank).

As these variations emerge, governments sometimes have to decide if they should allow them to flourish or try to crush them out of existence (e.g., airline miles, local currencies, or cryptocurrencies). If too many monetary claims start circulating that can all be exchanged for the “ultimate promise” of central-bank reserves or cash, hyperinflation can ensue. For example, around the turn of the millennium, Icelandic banks embarked on a vast campaign to expand beyond Iceland’s borders; as they issued private chits across Europe, the question emerged of whether these chits were ultimately guaranteed by the tiny central bank of Iceland. When the Icelandic private banking sector collapsed, the krona itself experienced a broad loss of value (Benediktsdóttir, Eggertsson, and Þórarinsson 2017).

Thus, a central bank’s job is partly to monitor the evolution of its own currency. Central banks can penalize the banking system for accepting a given currency; they can even announce that only one type of currency can serve as true legal tender and that all other variants issued must trade at par by having a one-to-one backing with the “true” currency. An array of other techniques are at their disposal as well (but as we have recently been learning, they have less ability to regulate the so-called “shadow banking” sector). Not least, they can turn to national law to insist that a given form of money is simply illegal inside a given territory, as the British did with their Bank Charter Act of 1844. But sometimes such shows of force don’t succeed, as when the nascent US Congress attempted to circulate “continentals” to help fund the revolution against Britain, instead of relying on the enemy’s own currency. The musical soundtrack to Hamilton reminds us, “Local merchants deny us equipment, assistance / they only take British money / so sing a song of six-pence” (2015), thus revealing that people do not always listen to the local monetary authorities.¹

States can also actively encourage circulation of their own money by simply relying on legal-tender laws and tax payments. As a result, people inside a given territory often must accept the “transaction costs” of converting foreign money into local money, which can play a role in individual decision-making about points of purchase (e.g., making local purchases look more attractive than foreign ones). Yet states can just as easily fail at instituting currency hegemony within their national borders. The Soviet Union, for example, mostly stopped fighting the influx of US dollars into the Soviet economy and instead learned to live with them by keeping them within certain economic sectors and spatial zones (Ledeneva 1998; Lemon 1998; Woodruff 1999). More dramatically, Ecuador simply stopped trying to keep the US dollar out of its economy and instead embraced the complete “dollarization” of its own economy (Cueva and Díaz 2019).

Clearly, some new types of currency in world history have survived, while others have perished; cryptocurrencies are but the latest currencies to be born (or to die) in our midst. Seen in this light, it feels safe to say that some cryptocurrencies will continue to disappear, while others will be here to stay. While some governments have voiced frustration and even fear at the gradual disappearance of hard cash, they are likely to eventually learn to live with some forms of digital currency.

REGULATING THE DIGITAL-MONEY REVOLUTION

One way that the monetary authorities of the modern era have consistently sought to control money has been to seize control of the “monetary base.” In the workaday language of monetary policy, the monetary base equals central-bank reserves plus circulating central-bank cash. In the mystical language of a carbon monetary policy, however, the monetary base is an inalienable possession of society. Given this, we should not be surprised to see that states become wary of any new tactics or players that can threaten their cherished inalienable possession. Past maneuvers for protecting the monetary base–cum–inalienable possession include export bans on gold and silver when they have served as the monetary base. More draconian still, sometimes states have even made it illegal for citizens to privately own the monetary base, as we learned in chapter 3; as the monetary base moved to fiat money, all forms of private issuance upon the old monetary base became illegal.

Jealously guarding an inalienable possession is, as we have argued, predictable behavior, so we should not be surprised to discover that monetary authorities are scared by the cryptocurrency revolution, which has allowed “regular people” to determine for themselves what the monetary base can be. Suddenly, the monetary base no longer needs to be the central bank’s reserves and its cash, but it can be anything that strikes the fancy of a currency creator. Most famously, bitcoin has nothing “behind” it—it is only valued because of the trust and value that people place within its entire community of users; there is no central bank that can swoop in to offer a guaranteed trade of dollars—or any commodity, for that matter—in exchange for bitcoin when its value comes into question. Put another way, bitcoin and its monetary base are one and the same thing. There is no stabilized hoard or reserve—no inalienable possession—that grounds its circulating value.

Without controlling the monetary base, central banks fear that a type of “stateless” money is being born before our very eyes. In response, we are today witnessing a rapidly growing global discussion about building “central bank digital currencies” (hereinafter, “CBDCs”), so that they can stop any migration to proliferating monetary bases. But digital currencies like bitcoin befuddle more than just central bankers; many “regular” citizens often hesitate to use nonstate digital money, because many like the assurance that something “real” lies behind the currency they are agreeing to trade. In the terminology being turned to here, citizens themselves like to know that there is a communally shared inalienable possession that undergirds the value of their chosen currency. Even if it is something that seems quite identical to the money they have in their bank account, people like to know that they can go to the bank and ask for “hard cash” in exchange for the digital chits they hold at the bank. Bitcoin and its mimics offer no such promise.²

But as with so much else in this story, the world has been here before. Often, when gold or silver coins have circulated in the past, they could only be traded on a market for other commodities; they were dependent on the global price they held at the time, just like bitcoin. Gold or silver had nothing “behind” them—they were only valued because of the trust and value that people placed within the entire community of users. It was only once monetary authorities seized gold and silver as the basis of their own system to create “sound money” that gold and silver traded for a guaranteed price, separate from whatever price they could fetch on the market (see, e.g., Knapfo 2013). And then, any obvious discrepancies between the guaranteed price and the market price could cause a central bank to “suspend payments,” lest they go bankrupt during moments that were advantageous to lurking arbitrageurs who hoped to see the accumulated hoard dispersed.

To understand the digital-currency revolution, then, we have to grasp this ongoing historical dialectic between state-controlled public money and market-controlled private money. Each has waxed and waned in power over different eras. For example, the creation of “eurodollars” during the post–World War II era represents a moment when market actors tried to undermine the solitary control that the United States had over the issuance of dollars. Contrariwise, we find that gold—what in the literature is an example of “commodity” money—was once “its own” form of “intrinsic” money, before it was overtaken by state systems (see Ferry 2016a and 2020); these latter first sought to control it but then later sought to eliminate it, as we saw in chapter 3. This eternal battle then brings us to today, where we see states finally catching up with the trends and needing to consider the possibility of building CBDCs. Seen against the backdrop of this battle between publicly versus privately issued money, cryptocurrencies are but new forms of commodity money: they achieve their value and utility from their ability to be traded vivaciously on a market, rather than having a central banking system that guarantees their value.

OF MONETARY BASES

Even without the gold standard, banks and central banks still both need to push the monetary base around the same way that Wicksell complained of gold long ago (see quote in chapter 1 and Wicksell 1936). Every night, after banks close, “interbank markets” spring to life, trading reserves back and forth to bring their books into harmony with regulations and best practices, while central banks also play a role in buying and selling reserves to and from private banks in order to influence the total quantity of money in the economy. So the foundational logic that secured the gold standard is actually the same today. There are vaults of immobilized (or at least slower moving) “concrete” objects (even if they are mere digits on a screen), and there are the more rapidly flowing chits that are issued upon these objects.

Again, we want to make a case for the foundational “weirdness” of this and point out how Weiner’s notion of inalienable possessions can illuminate it. In many monetary systems stretched out over many centuries, it would appear that humankind almost “needs” a dialectical relationship between the abstract and the concrete—the flowing and the immobilized. Indeed, battles among issuers and monetary reformers have often revolved around this question of who should be in charge of the monetary base or whether the base itself should just “be” the entirety of the monetary system, with no leveraged chits at all. The fight, it would seem, is over who should have control over this seemingly magical monetary base and whether its power should be reined in or let loose. Such battles are just what we would predict when people are fighting over who gets to have ultimate control over an immobilized inalienable possession and the lesser, circulating goods issued against it. Our banking system, in this sense, falls easily within Weiner’s logic, suggesting, once again, an important and telling overlap between banking and various societies’ understanding of the sacred.

Another testimony to this weirdness emerges when we study some of the world’s more arcane “currency experiments.” A quite well-known global movement since the 1980s has sought to promote so called “local currencies” (most often in the form of “Local Exchange Trading Systems”; see chapter 2). They model themselves, in part, on a monetary theorist from over a century ago, an Argentinean named Silvio Gesell.³ Gesell crafted an entire monetary theory based on his supposition that the problem with money lay with its alluring capacity to be hoarded. His treatise was entitled The Natural Economic Order precisely because he believed that money behaved unnaturally, and he wanted to force it into the natural cycle of birth and death. He noted that money was the only item traded on the market that did not live under the threat of decay and entropy. As a result, this gave the holder of money an inherent advantage over all other merchants. The seller of bananas could be told to come back the next day, when he would inevitably choose to sell for less. Gesell’s simple solution was to create a way for money to also decay. He called this “demurrage,” wherein the paper chits that circulated could have time stamps, and their value would be reduced with the addition of each stamp. This would, he argued, create unhoardable money; people would be pushed to spend instead of save, just as the banana merchant must also part with his cherished merchandise in order to survive. In such a scenario, Gesell boasted that money and goods could finally be equals on the same level playing field.

Following Gesell, this “hatred of hoarding” is one of the things that frequently unites many diverse local-currency movements around the world (see Peebles 2011). Interestingly enough, one of the reasons they are trying to banish hoarding is because they detest the power that concrete objects hold over people and the societies they hope to build (the precise inverse of gold-standard proponents). They consistently complain that “money should be a medium of exchange, not a store of value”; they build elaborate plans to eliminate interest rates, which they believe are examples of some fetishized external object (the monetary base) making unnecessary growth demands upon humans.⁴

Fascinatingly, these opinions then lead many local-currency proponents to eschew the reserve system described above, which is so standard—as we have argued—for so many forms of currency. In other words, they typically refuse to hold a collectivized hoard that could represent the chits that they all agree to circulate.⁵ Instead, if you ask members of local-currency groups what their chits represent in the absence of central reserves, you are likely to hear some variation on the idea that they represent the value embedded within the community; they are a recognition of the local human capital that lies hidden here that standard globalized capital cannot detect (see Maurer 2005; Peebles 2011). Whether you agree or disagree, the upshot of this stance is that, in many local-currency systems, no concrete reserve stands at the bottom of their abstract chain-of-promises. If you agree to accept a local-currency unit, you can only trade it within that group; there is no central authority to turn to in order to exchange it for some other, more liquid, value. This causes, by design, the local currencies to never flourish beyond a small, local, group.

But it also reveals, a contrario, the power of the external object—of the inalienable possession—that is typically secured in a vault. For example, if you worked hard in a local-currency movement for 5 years, gathering up a decent sum of currency units, but then needed to move across the country to take a new job, all that economic value you accumulated would be lost. If the group had a reserve fund built out of values “outside of itself,” you could trade your chits for an aliquot portion of the reserve fund and go on your merry way.

To be clear, from the perspective of local-currency advocates, there is no problem with this outcome. Indeed, local-currency projects aim to shrink borders and reduce consumption. They hope to build a vibrant local economy, to which members will become extremely dedicated and thus not want to ever leave. The decision to join a local currency entails a strong commitment to a given local economy and would presumably only be made by people who already have no strong intention of moving in the near future. In the language of economics, local currencies attempt to “raise the transaction costs” of choosing to buy goods in the next town over, instead of in one’s own. In this sense, they mimic the same idea we proposed in chapter 2 concerning the US-Canada border—local currencies build an intentional barrier so that it will be compelling for people to choose “the local” over “the global.” So while local-currency advocates hate the hoarding of concrete objects in vaults, they actually aim to “hoard” transactions, hoping that locals will opt for the corner store over Amazon.com. All of this, we are arguing, stems directly from their frequent refusal to hold a collective reserve—a decision that emanates out of their extreme faith in community institutions over physical objects. In short, they believe that the monetary base is a benighted fetish, retaining unnecessary powers from a bygone era.

This seeming tangent brings us full circle back to our attempt to better grasp the digital-money revolution. As mentioned above, the most famous cryptocurrency—bitcoin—shares this same refusal to have a centralized reserve, even if bitcoin arrived at this decision for entirely different philosophical reasons. Bitcoin users will also proudly inform you that the value of bitcoin resides in the collective totality of its users rather than in some external object that lies hidden in a vault. Without such a reserve fund, bitcoin has become notorious for two things: first, its fluctuating and unreliable value, which is exactly what we would predict; second, given its lack of “translatability” across spheres, bitcoin has itself become more typically hoarded than exchanged. No one has any particular confidence in its day-to-day value, so it has evolved as a hedge against risk rather than as a typical medium of exchange.

Our focus on the role of reserves becomes equally important when we consider the recent success of so-called “stablecoins,” which have emerged in the wake of bitcoin. Stablecoins transparently announce (and create a chain of promises) that they will hold a reserve fund of economic value, thereby converting themselves into clear examples of commodity money. When starting out, a new currency can greatly increase its chances of success if people know there is an underlying commodity that has a market value. Consequently, the barriers to both entry and exit go down considerably, and stablecoins have a clearer economic value, based on the pile of valuables that are sequestered away in a vault. A carbon-backed currency would offer precisely this, since solid carbon has always had a reliable market value.⁶

As we have done throughout this book, we are tempted to read this aspect of monetary history and policy debate “mystically.” A thriving currency typically must hold an intimate balance between flow and stasis, between a “dead” and unmoving reserve fund and the “living” chits that circulate around it. Such a system resembles, it would seem, a tree’s roots and its leaves and nuts. The roots sit safely hidden underground at the base of the tree, not to be touched; aboveground, the leaves burst forth in great multitude and at great risk, and the nuts eventually launch away from the tree to aid in the birth of another tree. Though the roots are more or less immobilized while the leaves and nuts are mobile, they turn to these inverse tactics to build the tree’s ability to survive and procreate.

Going further, this inverse behavior by a tree’s roots versus its leaves and nuts would seem to mimic the two great forces of nature, probed by Edgar Allan Poe in his deeply mystical text Eureka.⁷ In that text, Poe explains that, while we are accustomed to acknowledging gravity and its power, we are less aware that gravity’s opposite—repulsion—also serves as a governing force in nature. Every atom has a nucleus that constantly pulls circulating electrons toward it; but the electrons are also pushed away, outward from the nucleus. According to some interpretations (see Slooten 2017; Stamos 2018; Tresch 2021), Poe grasped the big bang avant la lettre, describing in Eureka how the birth and death of the universe will unfold as a result of these gravitational and repulsive forces pushing and pulling against one another through epochal periods of expansion (growth) and contraction (death). As described here, today’s fractional-reserve banking system⁸ looks more or less the same as this atomic and universal structure, including how currency crises are metaphorically akin to a nuclear explosion, splitting asunder the bonds that hold together floating, abstract monetary signs and immobilized, concrete monetary bases.

Perhaps none of this should be surprising; indeed, this could be regarded as “old as the hills.” After all, Heraclitus and Parmenides famously debated this very matter some 2,500 years ago. Was the world constituted by ever-changing flows (as the former claimed), or was it built by hidden certainties and stabilities (as the latter claimed)? With currency, we need not take sides, for it represents the dialectical synthesis of their claims. The stability of the reserve fund allows for the ever-changing flows of the chits, just as the reserve fund will wither away if no one wants to circulate the chits.

Tantalizingly, this suggests, once again, that currency could simply be humankind’s feeble attempt to mimic the laws of nature.⁹ Just as we fail to grasp all the laws that govern something as simple as weather patterns, which we still cannot perfectly predict, our various currencies are still riddled with misinterpretations and failures. But we seem to have collectively “intuited” that, at their structural root, many of our currencies should attend to the forces of both attraction and repulsion. They are, in this sense, Swedenborgian correspondences, hinting at hidden harmonies between the macrocosmic and the microcosmic.

Given the dire climate scenarios that so many of us are all too aware of, we believe that a stablecoin based on a sequestered carbon hoard and held in a Carbon Commons would spread rapidly among a willing and excited public. With the advent of the digital-money revolution, the legal conditions have changed to allow climate activists to harness the power of money and stop waiting for states to step in and solve the problem for us. The ongoing dialectic between state and private money described above means that climate activists who turn to currency as a vanguard weapon (one among many) in the fight against climate change need not abandon the state. Through the power of currency, activists can cajole the state to get its act together and finally step up to the climate battle. Because eventually—like the creation of CBDCs that emerged only after the threat posed by cryptocurrencies—we believe that states would start building their own sequestered carbon hoards, if only to protect themselves against a new monetary base that they feared was slipping out of their control.

DIGITAL-MONEY BASICS

Nevertheless, we don’t believe that digital money itself can serve as any sort of magic bullet to the climate crisis. If anything, cryptocurrency often seems like one of the symptoms of the crisis—they are often fueled by crude individualism, greed, and often a truly atrocious demand to meaninglessly burn carbon. Nevertheless, the infrastructure and the boundary-testing that has been accomplished by this revolution in private, digital money can provide some important guideposts for a new digital currency based on sequestered carbon.

Given our own mystical bent, this stance shouldn’t be surprising, since mystical traditions almost always acknowledge that the path to “the good” may well lead through “the evil.” Orthodox traditions are “purist,” whereas mystical ones embrace the messiness of the world, understanding that good ideas sometimes emanate from bad intentions. From this perspective, we can build upon the pathways that crypto has opened up for humanity, without also following its impulses. Crypto is not a straitjacket, it is a tool. If we refuse to recognize the new possibilities that it has opened up, all we do, in the end, is empower the current enthusiasts and give them more space to conquer the world with their vision of digital money. Therefore, in order to propose a new digital currency, we cannot shy away from the basic outlines of how cryptocurrencies perform their daily tasks.

One signature element of cryptocurrency is its “peer-to-peer” platform. Rather than relying on a hierarchical chain of promises as described above for state money, cryptocurrency typically eschews trust in banking infrastructure—and the experts they provide—in favor of a vast web of peer users. As a result, in opposition to “central” banking, cryptocurrencies are often “decentralized”; namely, there is no governing body of specialists within the institution—the community of users is the governing body.

Instead of depositing money in an institution like a bank, cryptocurrency users simply claim ownership over money that sits in a vast “distributed ledger.” The totality of exchanges is preserved in an ever-growing “blockchain” that allows for money to be traced and never duplicated. Money within that ledger is marked as owned by a given person, and only a “key” (kept in a “digital wallet”) can allow that money to be transacted away from one owner to another (Maurer 2015).

Like all currencies, cryptocurrencies also face the question of issuance. One reason for bitcoin’s popularity emerged out of its seemingly ironclad law concerning issuance. There are, we are told, only 21 million bitcoin that will ever exist.¹⁰ Brilliantly, bitcoin’s founder—the elusive and likely nonexistent Satoshi Nakamoto—created a system in which “mining” of bitcoins would become increasingly more expensive (Brunton 2019; Lam 2019). This presumably reflects his own form of conscious geomimicry, based on the fact that the biggest gold deposits were relatively easier to find (discovered in “veins”), whereas much gold today is chemically processed from low–ore content rocks and therefore much more expensive to mine (Ferry 2008; Robins 2022).¹¹

Whatever inspired this element of bitcoin’s structure, the core idea behind it reveals Nakamoto’s general lack of interest in a foundational element of standard monetary policy. By declaring a total limit on bitcoin issuance, Nakamoto was creating an inherently deflationary money. Because deflationary money tends to be hoarded (because it is worth more tomorrow than it is today), we find that bitcoin has failed to become a true medium of exchange and is mostly kept as a store of value. Inflation can, of course, be a problem for a currency, but so too can deflation. A sound monetary policy aims for mild and steady inflation to ensure—among other things—that there is no reward for simply sitting on one’s stash of bills, just as our friend Gesell feared.

In the meantime, without a central authority discerning when to issue new money, Nakamoto had to address how new bitcoin would come into being. Once again quite brilliantly, he sought to produce a digital mimic of old gold mining. Just like nineteenth-century gold mining, with enough inside knowledge and hardware, anyone can be an entrant into the bitcoin economy and push new currency into it. “Mining” occurs via the process that “verifies” transactions; miners are tasked with performing what is called a “proof-of-work” function, a labor-intensive (for a computer) decoding operation that targets the economic transactions of bitcoin itself as the material to mine. After this cryptographic work is performed once, verifiers (the larger bitcoin community) can double-check the work with far less expenditure, just as an assayer can place a trusted stamp on a gold ingot. In this manner, Nakamoto incentivized his community of users to take on the hard work of ensuring the sanctity of the distributed ledger, creating what is now famously known as a type of “permissionless consensus.” In a normal currency system, banks and central banks guarantee the sanctity of ledgers—whether by ensuring that hard cash is hard to counterfeit or by standing behind the transfer of digital funds within the banking system (Brunton 2019; Peebles 2020).

Since bitcoin’s invention in 2009, an almost unimaginable number of cryptocurrencies have blossomed. While many have established themselves as legitimate, many others had a “fly-by-night” character, with young founders inventing some simple token, hosting an “Initial Coin Offering” to the first users, and then relying on the “greater fool theory” to cash in and disappear.¹² This almost frantic efflorescence of shady—or at least, naive—activity is precisely what caused the founders of DogeCoin to issue their satirical currency.

It is also what inspired the birth of stablecoins. Stablecoins seek to grant renewed legitimacy to private digital money by backing it with a stable reserve of valuable assets. Stablecoins can be backed with anything—US dollars, oil, or even a different cryptocurrency—which then serves as a reserve fund of collateral for the issued stablecoin. As a result, stablecoins reintroduce the “chain of promises” discussed earlier. That is, instead of nonstate (anarchist) “permissionless consensus,” stablecoins rely on standard contract and property law to bolster trust in their currency; the asset reserve itself is crucial, but so too is the legal infrastructure that upholds the chain of promises. Needless to say, one could quickly predict that those who are distrustful of governments and banks would, thus, still prefer bitcoin over stablecoin.

But from the perspective of climate activism, this reliance on governments and banks need not be viewed in horror, as it is by bitcoin enthusiasts and gold enthusiasts¹³ alike. Our proposed digital currency would function, in some ways, like a commodity-backed stablecoin; people adopting the currency would know that each unit represented sequestered carbon. In the language of monetary policy, a digital carbon coin would be “pegged” rather than “floating,” while the carbon reserve itself would be valued on, and by, the international market. By providing a promised price for each ton of carbon, a digital carbon coin could trigger sequestration in forests and fields in much the same way that a pegged price for gold triggered the search for it in mountains. Such a digital currency would therefore embrace, rather than run away from, the chain of promises of commodity-backed money. That chain produces all sorts of knock-on benefits, not least trusting anonymous strangers, because, in trading such a currency, each exchange partner would know that both were committed to this same project.

Another knock-on benefit—and a key difference with cryptocurrency, including stablecoins—would be that this sequestered carbon reserve fund would find a natural home in a community-owned bank. As luck would have it, the dominant banking sector is already exploring the benefits of stablecoins (as opposed to broader cryptocurrencies beyond stablecoins), so the regulatory and systemic practices around banking stablecoin is already being addressed by experts. A bank dedicated to carbon sequestration, relying on already established stablecoin architecture, would then open up new pathways for the development of expertise by committed people, just as a community-owned fishery opens up pathways for the development of expertise among those who want to maintain that resource. To fight the climate battle, we want to cultivate experts, not disdain them. These experts would work inside the community banking system to verify and guarantee the health of the sequestered carbon hoard. Because it is community owned, their work would itself be monitored by the community of dedicated depositors.

Moreover, verification itself inside the cryptocurrency world has become notoriously unenvironmental, sucking immense amounts of electricity. Running bitcoin alone supposedly expends as much energy as the entire country of Argentina (Criddle 2021). Within a carbon-banking system, verification would occur via on-the-ground human labor rather than computer labor. Experts within the banking system would need to witness the sequestration of carbon with their own eyes, rather than turning to algorithms. In the process, they would build up still more vital wisdom about the local ecosystem that they hope to contribute to stewarding.

In this manner, community-owned banks—inside a well-managed Ostromian commons—could instead not only spur the sequestration of carbon but also inspire more and more people to jump into the global effort. The world has far more people who hope for functioning social and economic infrastructure than those who hate it. Most people want to hand off expert tasks to experts and would prefer to know that a currency is valuable due to trust in an institution, rather than having to undertake complex verification efforts themselves.

Contrary to our vision of a bankable stablecoin, cryptocurrencies can easily incarnate the cynicism of our current era. In their daily operation, many of them not only transparently announce a sort of winner-take-all individualism but clearly rely on the idea that another sucker is born every minute. Even though they rely on this ideology in multiple hidden ways, cryptocurrencies also gleefully announce an abandonment of trust in social infrastructure. Many cryptocurrency enthusiasts have already given up on government, sometimes voicing open disdain for it and those who continue to place their faith in it (Brunton 2019).

Battling this sensibility, a community-owned carbon-banking system could revivify this broken trust in expertise and social infrastructure. People would develop relational ties not only to their local carbon bank and the digital currency that it issued but also to the more-than-human local ecology that it aimed to steward; their use and monitoring of the commons-based currency would incarnate and grow their trust in the institutions issuing and storing it.

THE NEW PHARMAKON

In ancient Greek, the word “pharmakon” means both “poison” and “cure.” This need not be seen as quite so paradoxical, since small, controlled doses of poisons can also, of course, serve as cures; but sometimes too much of a cure is itself poisonous, as the proverb “the cure is worse than the disease” attests. This nicely encapsulates humankind’s ongoing struggles with money over thousands of years. Countless tomes have been written concerning its poisonous nature, just as an equal number of books have dwelled on its extraordinary curative properties. If we expect either utopian deliverance or dystopian catastrophe out of our money, we’ll always get it wrong. Instead, we should see it as pharmakon, relying on it just enough to help us solve problems while not aiming to deify or destroy it. Like the water to which it is frequently compared, too much and too little money both produce deadly outcomes.

To date, cryptocurrencies have bifurcated us along the same lines—some of us deify them, some of us want to destroy them. But more likely, we need to learn to live with them, not least by taking their central message seriously. And the central message is not that they can build an anarchic world (for good or ill) but that they have enabled the democratization of the control of the monetary base. Determining what the monetary base should be has always been the preserve of the powerful and wealthy, whether we are talking about kings, central banks, or even—to at least some degree—elite foreign-exchange traders.

Thus, instead, the message we take from the cryptocurrency revolution is that we now have both the tools and the permission to build and steward our own monetary base. We need not sit back and wait helplessly as central banks, governments, and corporations refuse to address the climate crisis. The cryptocurrency revolution has opened up the possibility for humanity to create a new monetary base for a new age, grounded in the stuff of life: carbon. As we have detailed throughout, the monetary base (aka the inalienable possession) that grounds the movement of monetary chits has been wildly variable across time and space, with communities using the money that is either forced upon them or that suits their needs (or both). Considering the needs that humanity must address today, we have a sneaking suspicion that—if we can get the architecture both right and reliable—many people will be excited to embrace carbon as the new inalienable possession that would bind their community together, while simultaneously knitting them inextricably to nature.

For so long, there has been the well-known myth of American individualism, but that is really only one side of the coin. The myth of American individualism—of “pulling oneself up by one’s bootstraps” or the “self-made man”—can only be produced by disavowing the inherent reliance on community infrastructure that allowed this myth to blossom. To take an obvious example, a billionaire’s wealth can only be produced and secured by structures of property law and its enforcement that densely weave their way through such things as schooling, courts, police, and the cheap leasing of land seized during colonial conquest, to say nothing of the privileges related to race and gender that have been built up by this same social infrastructure through time (see Pistor 2020). Or what of billionaires who own auto companies? Without government spending on roads, highways, parking lots, and subsidized mining leases on public lands, Elon Musk couldn’t sell one Tesla because it would have nowhere to go.

Yet somehow the seamless way that many CPRs, public goods, and the bureaucratic experts that support them have dappled themselves through our landscape has generally caused us to credit success to individual pluck instead of community support. Few people recognize their daily reliance on the simplest highway bridge or a reliable court system, but it only exists because of successful efforts by the bureaucrats and middlemen that the myth of American individualism loves to hate. Cryptocurrency enthusiasts are only the latest group to blithely dismiss these hard-won efforts that allow them to gain individual wealth. As Linebaugh ominously tells us, “the commons is invisible until it is lost” (Linebaugh 2014, 14).

Against the cryptocurrency revolutionaries, a carbon-banking system would, then, be a counterintuitive plea for the revolutionary power of invisible bureaucrats and middlemen. If we could ensure that this digital currency and its banking system were owned by the community and not by individuals or corporations, it could help revitalize the decayed trust that has allowed so many to give up on fighting the climate battle. In using the currency, we would be forced to recognize our everyday reliance not only on experts and middlemen but also on carbon—the building block of life itself. These experts and middlemen would be serving the earth, as workers and volunteers at the first and last bank that has been hidden to us all along, but which now needs to come out of the shadows and be consciously stewarded rather than pillaged.

NOTES

1. Incidentally, counterfeit bills are also policed by this same system—although they may be less viral mutation than quack medicine. But we need not concern ourselves too much with this aspect of the parallel we are trying to draw, since it doesn’t undermine the argument either way.

2. Two books from opposing sides of the nascent policy debate over digital money serve to frame it very well. See Rogoff 2017 and Scott 2022.

3. Though he is today considered a monetary “crank,” it is important to note that Keynes considered Gesell pivotal in his own revolutionary thinking about the monetary system (see Keynes 1997, Book VI, chapter 23). We discuss Gesell in chapter 2 as well.

4. This topic, which has been debated for decades, goes by the name of the “monetary growth imperative” (see, e.g., Arnsperger, Bendell, and Slater 2021).

5. This is finally changing, with a likely impact on the increasing popularity of local currencies. See Kanters 2023.

6. There have already, in fact, been a few “tree” or carbon-backed stablecoins proposed, and some are already functioning today. Two of them appeared to be fly-by-night frauds and can no longer be found online. But a group of them are moving forward and can be reviewed here: CarbonCredits.com Investor’s Education Center, “Top 5 Carbon Crypto Companies to Watch in 2024,” accessed September 4, 2024, https://carboncredits.com/the-top-5-carbon-crypto-companies-to-watch-in-2023. However, three pivotal elements make these stablecoins markedly different from our proposal: 1) In order to create artificial scarcity for their coin so that it will be attractive, Nori has limited how much total carbon they want to sequester, and it’s not nearly enough; 2) None of them organize their work around banking, which we take to be mission-critical (instead, they rely on the blockchain); 3) They are all profit-driven—ultimately, they are offering “tokenized” assets instead of a currency, and they are hoping that initial adopters will see increased returns down the line. In contrast, we believe that both the local bank and the currency it issues will create a community of shared interest that is absolutely critical at this time.

7. This text is infamously unreadable, but Poe was prouder of it than anything else he wrote and considered it his true masterpiece. If one keeps in mind the text’s Hegelian and mystical underpinnings, it is less cumbersome to grasp what he is trying to say. Regardless of its difficulty, in this text Poe is also credited with “intuiting” that “space and duration are one,” some seventy years before physicists posited those claims (see Stamos 2018).

8. Some economists point out that it is misleading to depict the US banking system as still following a “fractional-reserve” model. But just because the US banking system has transcended fractional-reserve banking, it does not mean that we cannot apply the model historically, nor speculatively, to future banking systems.

9. Many authors since antiquity have pointed out the harmonies between the circulation of blood through a body and the circulation of currency through the “body politic.”

10. In reality, bitcoin’s founder, Satoshi Nakamoto, created a system that could allow for new issuance beyond 21 million, but it requires a 51 percent majority to change the rules.

11. Robins 2022 tells us further that “the U.S. Geological Survey estimates that, of the world’s known gold, roughly 63,000 tons are still in the ground, compared with roughly 206,000 tons that have already been mined. And the world’s unmined gold is generally unmined only because it’s deeper underground and thus less accessible.”

12. The greater fool theory posits that the main driver of asset prices becomes speculation and nothing else, rather than the “intrinsic value” of the commodity (Adriano 2018, 20–22). In one notorious incident, a Bulgarian woman founded a cryptocurrency, so-called “OneCoin,” and then proceeded to disappear from the face of the earth, absconding with a significant percentage of the 4 billion British pounds that OneCoin bilked from its enthusiasts (Bartlett 2022).

13. See Peebles (n.d.) for a deeper study of the monetary ideology of the so-called “goldbugs.”

8 THE CULT OF SCARCITY

The ways that millions of people bounce off one another—buying and selling, lending and borrowing, intersecting with governments and central banks and businesses and everything else around us—amount to a system so complex that no human fully comprehends it. ‘Macroeconomics behaves like we’re doing physics after the quantum revolution, that we really understand at a fundamental level the forces around us,’ said Adam Posen, president of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, in an interview. “We’re really at the level of Galileo and Copernicus.…”

—Neil Irwin, “Nobody Really Knows How the Economy Works”

COMMERCIAL CORNUCOPIA

What parent doesn’t dread the cereal aisle of the grocery store? As their kids gawk at its unending yardage, they become giddy and overwhelmed by the cornucopia of sugary treats looming around them, all promising to deliver breakfast bliss. Americans have a proverb for describing immeasurable joy and the uncontrollable urges it instills: “like a kid in a candy store.” But since candy stores are hard to come by these days, the proverb should be updated to reflect how the cereal aisle has now usurped its role as the famed epicenter of abundant sugar.¹

But aside from the pleas, yelps, and whines that they must endure in this temple to breakfast, parents often hate the cereal aisle because it forces them to convey the brutal and plodding pedagogy of scarcity. Conscripted as teachers into this dismal curriculum, parents implicitly learn that scarcity doesn’t “feel natural” to kids—it’s something we must hammer into them. Because, from a kid’s-eye perspective, the cereal aisle appears to be constituted by abundance. Indeed, the grocery store overflows with more staples and treats than any one family could ever need, suffusing kids with the notion that every bodily need is close at hand, a veritable Garden of Eden.

Kids suffer this (apparent) delusion, of course, because they cannot simultaneously see the hidden tallying device in every parent’s pocket (and mind): money. Money confronts the heavenly cereal aisle and divvies it up into “can afford” and “cannot afford,” overlaying abstract scarcity upon its concrete abundance. Kids might even try to heap up a personal hoard of colorful boxes in their cart, only to watch their parent carefully place them back on the shelves. Supremely contradicting all the evidence presented to the kids’ eyes, grocery-store experiences like this gradually introduce children to the concept of money and the rules it sets. After a few visits, kids—decidedly less giddy now—stop trying to grab every tantalizing box that presents itself to them. Parents can now navigate the cereal aisle more placidly, having drilled their charges in the governing ethos of scarcity.

The Freudians who study child development might say this desire to pluck all the cereal boxes attests to kids’ careless egotism prior to developing a superego. But what if it represents their “truthful” understanding of the world? After all, whenever a good is in abundance, adults also typically think that they can just grab it (e.g., few people insist on the private ownership of pencils). Walking through the grocery store, children are confronted with systemic abundance; it is left to their parents to laboriously explain that, contrary to the sprawling buffet before them, they must choose carefully, because in this world that humanity has crafted, scarcity reigns.²

Beyond the grocery store, our everyday surroundings stand as an ongoing tribute to abundance. In the “natural” world, we have so much air to breathe that we don’t even know how to price it; birds come and go each year without dying in droves for lack of food; seeds sail through the wind, turning into fodder for worms because they are “overproduced.” Even in the “artificial” world, there are too many TV shows produced in a given year than any one human could ever watch; in the United States, there are more registered cars—a very expensive product—than adults in America. Even the poorest nations on earth may not have a surfeit of staple goods, but, for example, when someone chooses a paint color, they can pick from an abundance of available colors rather than just one.

The world—both the natural and artificial one—is awash in goods.

This is not to say that scarcity doesn’t exist. Of course we are aware of horrific famines, droughts, and all manner of terrifying situations where scarcity has reigned. But it is to say that—as much research has shown—a decent percentage of scarcity is “socially produced.” There is, for example, enough food to feed the world, but we are abysmal at distributing it fairly and equally; atrocious amounts of food go to waste every day across the planet. As Alan Rosenblith states, “If we experience scarcity … the problem is with our systems, not the universe” (cited in Bollier and Helfrich 2019, 65). Less contentiously, we can also say that, given that humanity experiences both abundance and scarcity, it’s a bit odd that economics has convinced us that the world is constituted by “natural” scarcity. Our politics, our social-scientific research, and even our parental pedagogy is largely focused on scarcity as the governing logic of the world—it “just is” that way. But in fact, scarcity is but one side of the coin.

So, as Swedenborg might say, is there a world hiding “behind the veil”? One constituted by abundance? Is our experience of “scarcity” an objectively true fact about the world, or is it “socially constructed” (and then further reinforced by culture)?

If it is socially constructed, might our monetary system, so carefully founded upon the logic of scarcity, be yet another example of our flawed and incomplete biomimicry? Inflation—overabundant money—is the ever-looming threat that keeps central bankers awake at night. But if nature embraces abundance as much as scarcity—or at least has a far better grasp of the dialectic between the two—could we build a currency that better accounts for the abundance we find both in nature and in the cereal aisle? After all, as will be argued below, through our cross-cultural and cross-historical engagement with “hoards,” humanity has long managed and theorized the control of unwanted excess. In order to combat the threat of overabundant sequestered carbon, these well-honed and age-old tactics would only need to be newly applied to a carbon-backed monetary policy.

And anyway, maybe we don’t want our money to be quite so scarce anymore? A growing branch of economic thinking, referred to as “Modern Monetary Theory,” even has one proponent who has returned to Fisher’s (1997) term, “money famine,” to describe the tragic idiocy of the many historical instances where millions of people suffer only due to a monetary policy that fetishizes scarcity (Rice 2018). As William Jennings Bryan demanded long ago, perhaps it is high time that we not sacrifice ourselves on this “cross of gold.”

THE ECONOMY OF WANTS

Early on in the history of economics, Adam Smith famously pondered the odd distinction between water and diamonds (Smith 2011). The former is considered a gift from god, one of the cornerstones of life itself; the latter is utterly meaningless to the survival of our species, a complete “extravagance” that all of us can easily survive without. Yet despite its obviously crucial status in our lives, water is often free, whereas diamonds remain beyond the reach of most of us.

Without delving into the solution to the “water-diamond paradox” that was solved years later by William Stanley Jevons (by introducing the theory of “marginal utility”), we can instead rely on the paradox to showcase a uniquely human problem. No other animals would make the mistake of elevating something superfluous over something essential. Only humans could be this stupid.

Or perhaps, only certain humans could be this stupid.

Kimmerer introduces her readers to the Onondaga Nation’s Thanksgiving Address, which often invokes Mother Earth’s impressive abundance as the empirical justification for giving thanks:

As far as the eye can see, the Plants grow, working many wonders. They sustain many life forms. With our minds gathered together, we give thanks and look forward to seeing Plant life for many generations to come.… With one mind, we honor and thank all the Food Plants we harvest from the garden, especially the Three Sisters who feed the people with such abundance. Since the beginning of time, the grains, vegetables, beans, and fruit have helped the people survive. Many other living things draw strength from them as well. We gather together in our minds all the plant foods and send them a greeting and thanks. (Kimmerer 2013, 109)

The Thanksgiving Address encapsulates a worldview organized around abundance that anthropologists have documented in many cultures (Bakic and Muir 2021; Day, Papataxiarchis, and Stewart 1998; Sahlins 1972). Eliade encapsulates the same wisdom when, after surveying many world religions, he avers that “every creation springs from an abundance. The gods create out of an excess of power, an overflow of energy. Creation is accomplished by a surplus of ontological substance” (1959, 97).³ Cultures inhabiting these spaces of abundance may not be the “dominant” cultures that have conquered vast territories of the earth, but they have sustained themselves for countless generations, not least by kicking the bugbear of scarcity to the curb. When scarcity does befall them, they have many coping mechanisms and survival strategies (often organized around standard ethics of commons governance), but they do not allow the shadow of scarcity to cloud their daily judgment.

So perhaps it’s time that we got a little bit smarter by listening to more Indigenous science. After all, the epigraph for this chapter (taken from a New York Times article) called into question the grip that the discipline of economics has over us. Bluntly titled “Nobody Really Knows How the Economy Works. A Fed Paper Is the Latest Sign,” the article went on to insist that the economy is far too complex to be encapsulated by mathematical formulae:

The ways that millions of people bounce off one another—buying and selling, lending and borrowing, intersecting with governments and central banks and businesses and everything else around us—amount to a system so complex that no human fully comprehends it. “Macroeconomics behaves like we’re doing physics after the quantum revolution, that we really understand at a fundamental level the forces around us,” said Adam Posen, president of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, in an interview. “We’re really at the level of Galileo and Copernicus.” (Irwin 2021)

Questioning whether the economy could truly be reduced to mathematical formulae, the expert who is quoted is really asking us for a little bit of humility. For starters, we could liberate ourselves from the cult of naturally imposed scarcity and instead recognize that, in many instances (including and especially in the production of money), scarcity is socially produced.⁴

In fact, we do have a long history of regulating abundance, but it has been largely forgotten in our more market-driven era. In commons all over the world, local populations craft locally appropriate tactics for ensuring that everyone gets their fair share of an abundant resource. As Demsetz (2000) famously argued, it is mostly once a good becomes scarce that insiders try to push it out of the commons and privatize it. If we push ourselves to organize a new currency around the notion of the commons, we might be able to transcend our fixation on money’s scarcity.

And anyhow, is money scarce? Or is it just distributed in such a way to make many of us feel that way? The Brookings Institution—a highly respected and very moderate think tank—tells us, “In 2018, U.S. households held over $113 trillion in assets. For context, that is over five times as much as all the goods and services produced in the U.S. economy in a single year. If that amount were divided evenly across the U.S. population of 329 million, it would result in over $343,000 for each person. For a family of three, that’s over a million dollars in assets” (Sawhill and Pulliam 2019). Or what of the recent years of “quantitative easing,” a policy of several central banks that deliberately floods the market with money and which has had little threatening impact on the functioning of the currencies that have implemented it. And around the world, so called basic-income “experiments” have been occurring for ages without scholarly consensus on its feared inflationary impacts (Miller 2021; Widerquist 2024). Such empirical evidence forces us to ask, why on earth do we accept the claim that money needs to be “scarce” in order to function properly?

At the same time, hyperinflation undeniably exists and is not to be recommended as a policy outcome. So any proposal for a carbon-backed currency must obviously guard against it. Many economists are, admittedly, “at sea” (though officially confident) about the true nature of inflation and what drives it; the two primary theories that they have relied on for ages—“future expectations” and the Phillips Curve—have no empirical support (Rudd 2021).⁵ There is, therefore, a new opening for discussing how a commons-based currency could forestall the nightmare of hyperinflation. We must shift the question to whether there might be a better way to “ground” the economy in a monetary system that is better balanced with—and better mimics—nature. Along the way, we might find that it also offers a response to the deep structural inequalities embedded in the current monetary system, which also forces too many people to live in an unnecessary “money famine.”

And recalling the twisted nature of humanity’s restless drive for “useless” diamonds,⁶ we must also ask the question that opened this entire book: might there be other tasks that a monetary policy can undertake that might be equally—or even more—important than ensuring the smoothest possible circulation of goods? Sequestering carbon is the primary goal of a carbon-backed currency; therefore, our policy recommendations only elevate monetary policy insofar as they aid in the pursuit of that goal, rather than being oriented around making Cords the “best possible” currency hitherto known to humankind. Every single one of history’s currencies have been far from perfect, but they have mostly gotten their daily job done. That’s all we are aiming for with Cords. We do not need a perfect money in order to sequester the world’s carbon at a global scale; all we need is a currency that is “good enough for government work.”

THE POWER OF DEFLATION

Instead of endlessly fearing the power of inflation, we propose a renewed focus on its opposite: deflation. Though hiding in plain sight, deflation is the forgotten dialectical counterpart of inflation. As the philosopher Jacques Derrida would say, it plays the role of the “transcendental signified” in the pair, unmarked and largely forgotten. But as linguists and poststructuralists alike know all too well, the transcendental signified is unmarked and forgotten precisely because of its deep power. As such, the inflation-deflation dyad needs to be “deconstructed.” While inflation means that a given good is losing relative value, deflation means that a given good is gaining relative value. In daily life, this means that people typically hope to pass the inflationary object off to someone else as quickly as possible (leading to its rapid circulation), whereas they hope to drive the deflationary object into a hoard (immobilizing it). Needless to say, this is a restatement of Gresham’s Law—the law that holds the key to our carbon-banking proposal.

Economists relentlessly remind us that “exchange” means that goods are swapped. That is, there is no exchange if only one object changes hands, which is the popular—but mistaken—understanding of “buying” something. Our language helps us forget that the person selling an object to a consumer is herself “buying” a currency with that object. Distinguishing exchange from seizure, economists will tell you that “both parties win in such an exchange,” because it maximizes the subjective value of their marginal utility: one party walks away with the currency they were seeking, while the other walks away with the good they were seeking.

The same is true of currency itself, when seen as part of a “commodity money” paradigm. The bank wants the gold, and the depositor wants the chits. Or, in our case, the bank would want the sequestered carbon, while our depositors would want the chits. It is important to probe this a bit further, because throughout the history of banking, the item that lands in the reserves has traditionally been considered “more liquid,” which is to say that “it holds value over a longer space and time” than its competitors. The fact that one party in an exchange can acquire items that are more likely to hold value over vaster stretches of time and space is what drives Gresham’s Law. Subjectively, each party increases their marginal utility by swapping chits and reserves; objectively, though, the latter has typically been deflationary, while the former has typically been inflationary.⁷

In other words, there is no such thing as just “inflation” or just “deflation.” Rather, when you see inflation, it necessarily means that something else is deflating in relative value. If a currency, for example, is hyperinflating away its value, people will rush to trade it for goods that are deflating in relation to it. Thus, in order to drive sequestered carbon into bank hoards, Cords should be—just as central banks always aim for with their own national currencies—mildly inflationary; in this manner, the convenience they provide as a payment platform and as a catalyst for climate action will outweigh people’s desire to hold onto actual sequestered carbon. Cords holders would happily hand off that task to their local banks, genuinely hoping that sequestered carbon will deflate while their chits (mildly) inflate, thereby aiding in the fight against climate change.

Lest this sound far-fetched, this is precisely what happened during the age of the gold standard, as recounted in chapter 3: National governments issued chits in exchange for gold, depositors received a national standard of value in the form of paper, and banks received an international standard of value in the form of gold. Without question, gold was more liquid over a wider swath of time and space, and its value deflated over the decades—quite dramatically against the currencies in which it was measured. Put bluntly, over time, paper inflated while gold deflated. The net outcome was the global sequestration of gold. Thus, by deconstructing the deflation-inflation dyad, we learn that monetary policy only needs to focus on relative scarcity, not absolute scarcity. A more fine-tuned understanding of this will allow us to leverage the same phenomenon in order to sequester carbon.

In reconsidering the data on inflation, we can say, firstly, that few people—including central bankers—even know what they’re doing, as the New York Times headline above so forcefully put it. But secondly, it feels “safe” to consider that a currency acquires its stability by way of a sort of Goldilocks principle: The total amount in circulation has to be “just right.” Otherwise, there will be too many chits chasing too few commodities, causing inflation of the currency (and deflation of the goods); or the reverse, causing deflation of the currency (and inflation of the goods).

If we recognize that non-nationalized currencies are “just” goods in the marketplace that happen to promise certain appealing conveniences or mission-driven tools, then we need not be quite so terrified of the bugbear of abundance and its accompanying threat of hyperinflation. Take, for example, milk. It tends to be present in almost every household, at least across a huge number of countries across the world. Just like money, people “need” it to get by every day, but no one would say that it was too abundant. Paranoia about inflationary milk has not seized the day; it holds its value in the marketplace despite its ubiquity in virtually every private and commercial refrigerator across the globe.

More fascinatingly still, the circulation of milk provides us with intriguing comparative data, for in the United States no central board of milk distributors worries too much about whether the ubiquity of milk is causing its value to dangerously inflate away. Meanwhile, the European Union devotes a significant percentage of its expenditures each year to regulating the agricultural economy via its well-known “Common Agricultural Policy” (CAP). In previous decades, the CAP guaranteed a price “floor” on such crucial items as milk, butter, and wine (Lillemets, Fertö, and Viira 2022; Stead 2007; see also Weber and Schulken 2024 for a plan to store excess agricultural products to cope with supply shocks). Consequently, Europe built up infamous reservoirs of milk, lakes of wine, and mountains of butter that it had to store, thereby regularly sweeping the overproduction of these goods off the market (in the language of previous chapters, “sterilizing” them). By guaranteeing a price per liter, Europe had—for better or for worse—driven excess milk, wine, and butter into communally owned hoards.⁸

Following this same logic, our proposed carbon banks could—like the IMF with its “Special Drawing Rights” (SDRs, described in chapter 5) or like the EU’s CAP—periodically revisit the price they are willing to pay for sequestered carbon. If too much carbon comes into the banks’ coffers, they could alter the reserve requirements, thereby releasing fewer chits into the economy. Also, by changing the Cord currency peg for sequestered carbon, they can make it easier or harder to acquire chits in exchange for it, thereby further influencing the total amount of chits in circulation. In any case, our local banks (and central bank, if one were to emerge) would pay close attention to a basic basket of local commodities for sale with Cords; if the price were increasing too rapidly, they could turn to the usual tactics of central bankers (as described in chapter 5) to help maintain the price level.

Most significantly, because our banks’ primary mission is to promote the sequestration of carbon rather than to increase the bottom line of their owners, they could “explode their balance sheet” just as many central banks have done during the most recent financial crisis. By buying excess sequestered carbon and simply “parking it” in the bank coffers whenever it threatens to be overabundant, our banks could do significant work in the climate battle (just as Europe’s CAP does in the battle to preserve its agricultural heritage). If central banks and the EU can both agree to buy toxic and/or near worthless assets (whether butter or mortgage-backed securities is no matter) in order to stave off a national crisis, surely a carbon bank could choose to do the same with overabundant carbon in order to stave off a global climate crisis.

The fact that storing carbon might be seen as a distinctly unsolvable problem (as compared with our bureaucrats’ humdrum capacity to store toxic financial assets or butter) only reinforces our argument that we see ourselves as separate from nature. Governments have routinely been willing to intervene in novel ways to save the banking system and agricultural communities because they are seen as “part of them,” and governments represent the people who rely on banks and farming communities. Surely governments can now awaken to the obvious fact that we rely on nature in order to survive too. As long as the collectivized owners of the carbon banks are willing to take on the “toxic” asset of overabundant carbon, they should be able to weather any storms resulting from such unorthodox actions, just as the US dollar proved to be just fine after the central bank quintupled its balance sheet during the global financial crisis (Pasaogullari 2015).

Indeed, across countless fields, societies routinely ask themselves how to address the problem of abundance: police departments receive excess military hardware, municipal water agencies build reservoirs, dumps are built to gather garbage, real estate is “warehoused” rather than offering cheap housing to the poor.⁹ In other words, humanity has managed abundance for millennia by activating our capacity to accumulate and disperse communal hoards (see Fullarton’s “sponge mechanism,” mentioned in chapter 3). This is not rocket science. The fact that we seem uniquely incapable of knowing how to hoard sequestered carbon seems like a singular failing. Given the truly preposterous nature of this failure, we clearly need to alter the discussion. By naming carbon excess as our foundational economic value and hoping—collectively—for its relative deflation, we can seize the wheel from narrow-minded corporations and sclerotic governments.

CURRENCY LIKE GRAIN, MONEY LIKE WATER

In chapters 2 and 7, we discussed Silvio Gesell, a monetary theorist who focused heavily on the dangers of hoarding. Gesell sought to introduce the “forced inflation” of money so that “[t]he holder of money is hunted and worried by his possession just as formerly the producer was hunted and worried by his goods until he had passed them on to someone else” (1929, 231). Gesell’s solution was “demurrage,” a sort of inflation tax that would bring currency in line with the “natural world,” causing it to rot like all of the other goods that it circulated against; such a tax, he argued, would push money out of hoards. As proposed in chapter 5, Cords could lose value as they travel farther away from their bank of issuance, in order to represent the increased carbon footprint associated with such travel. In Gesellian terms, this would act as a place-based (rather than time-based) form of “demurrage,” forcing the currency to lose value as against goods that are for sale far away (but holding value against goods that are for sale locally). Fortuitously, digital money offers the capacity to provide this sort of tracking information about the origin of a given unit of currency. At the same time that this policy would force a place-based sort of inflation upon holders of Cords, it would simultaneously be another weapon against the ever-present threat of overabundant money. Introducing a place-based discount rate would effectively “kill” a percentage of the total number of chits in circulation; they would die every time they left their “hometown.”¹⁰

Additionally, just because carbon is abundant, we need not assume that verified sequestered carbon would be abundant. Indeed, Woolf et al. have already reported that the amount of ethically sourceable feedstock for biochar production is limited (2010). Given these obvious issues of quality and ethics, just as the Chicago Mercantile Exchange learned long ago how to gradate qualities of grain (see Cronon 2004), building a large market for sequestered carbon will likely cause a gradation system to develop, and we would learn that not all sequestered carbon is created equal. This would also have an impact on the total number of chits in circulation, by offering fewer chits for lower-grade sequestrations.¹¹

In this regard, also consider the somewhat mysterious, but very robust, market in bottled water. Even though there is often free water “ready-to-hand,” somehow “verified” bottled water still manages to sell at a premium price. That is, the price of branded water does not seem to be threatened by the obvious abundance of unbranded water in its midst. Abundant free water surely sets a ceiling on the price for which bottled water can sell, but it does not destroy its price in a wave of abundance-induced inflation. Like “verified” bottled water, we believe that the many benefits of a verified carbon-backed currency would allow it to circulate and hold its price, regardless of how much “uncoined” carbon circulates nearby.

In the process, our verifiers (chapter 6) would ensure that only waste carbon was converted into sequestered carbon, thereby drastically reducing the available carbon for conversion (no one would be allowed, for example, to raze a healthy forest in order to acquire chits).¹² Yet the mere opportunity to sequester waste carbon will help millions of citizens feel a new and vital sense of power in the climate battle, so we cannot be upset if there is not quite as much carbon to sequester as we might otherwise hope.

Despite all of this reasoning, it remains ludicrous to suggest, even for a moment, that gold and carbon can be made equally scarce.¹³ Without a doubt, if not managed properly, overabundant carbon could be a systemic threat to a carbon-backed currency. At the same time, this is where we can, finally, turn to a carbon standard to critique the gold standard. The main problem with the gold standard was its extreme deflation. There was simply too little gold to sequester on the planet, given how robust the economy was at the time. The extreme scarcity of gold caused an unnecessary “money famine.”

A carbon standard, then, could offer a happy medium—grounding our economy within the limits of nature, while still allowing for enough issuance to keep the economy from becoming paralyzed. We could, for example, pronounce at the outset of the project that the total amount of Cords in global circulation should stop growing once we achieve preindustrial levels of atmospheric carbon. This would set a total limit on our issuance, responding to people’s fears about creating a “limitless” money (outsized fears, we are arguing here). Offering a total limit would create an imposed and guaranteed scarcity, just as it has with the gold standard and bitcoin, but it would be sufficiently high so as not to threaten the stability of the monetary system, as has occurred with those two monetary instruments. If humanity successfully sequestered so much carbon that we were back to preindustrial levels, then we could search for a new monetary standard, as we have seen in history so many times before. In other words, the task of this currency is to sequester carbon; if that task is ever finalized, then perhaps some other crisis will rear its ugly head, and we can use a new currency to respond to a new crisis. We restate once again: Cord is not proposed as some ultimate “end-of-history” currency. No currency has ever achieved immortality, and we should not expect Cords to be any different.

CHASING CARBON, CHASING COMMODITIES

According to the gold-standard model, our banks would pay a higher rate per kilo (or ton or what have you) in order to attract early users, but as the currency became more prolific, banks could make it “more expensive to mine” by simply paying a lower rate per unit. Like bitcoin, we could state at the outset that the outer limit of Cords to be produced will reflect the amount estimated for returning the atmosphere to preindustrial levels. As we get increasingly close to that limit, we could make the chits scarcer by paying far less per kilo.¹⁴ But because more and more people will have become excited about using Cords and joining its mission to fight catastrophic climate change, they would join the system at the higher rate, just as we find people still mining bitcoin even as the costs of doing so keep rising.

At the same time, by newly valuing sequestered carbon as the most sacred item in our economy, it will experience growing demand as local banks try to acquire more and more of it. As with all goods that experience growing demand, this will trigger innovators to rush into the market, imagining new ways to sequester carbon at ever-lower prices. But these innovations would also likely create new places in which to sequester carbon (e.g., concrete). In this fashion, we hope that the Cord banking system could gradually find enough places in which to sequester all the needed carbon while also increasing demand for it well beyond our banks. This dynamic would simply have to be monitored carefully to ensure that the price we offered for sequestered carbon always staved off arbitrage, while also ensuring the overall relative scarcity of chits. But this sort of vigilance need not be any more daunting than the vigilance required to monitor the value of any other vital good.

Finally, we should return to the argument about “money famines.” Following a growing number of monetary theorists today, we urge a more liberal stance concerning the increase in the money supply. With Cords, this could do wonders to combat the money famine that exists in pockets of urban and rural poverty across the globe today. By jumping into the Cord project early on, these communities could produce their own money rather than fight hard to break into the national currency that is not produced in enough abundance for them to acquire it (see Pettifor 2018). In this sense, they would regain control of two vital fields of governance that have left them behind—not only over the climate battle but also over monetary policy.

In short, if the Cord economy is growing, with more and more people engaging in a sustainable economy organized around carbon sequestration, then the total number of chits can safely grow a bit larger than orthodox monetary theories might ordinarily dictate. This would have the knock-on benefit of drawing people out of the unnecessary poverty resulting from a money famine. By encouraging urban and rural populations alike to discover waste feedstock lying in their midst, our collectively owned banks could open access to capital to millions of people who are currently excluded from it.

HIDDEN HOARDS, VISIBLE WEALTH

When a “hidden” community-owned hoard is alive and has credit issued upon it (as opposed to rare and truly dead hoards, like a forgotten Viking treasure trove), it helps to create wealth. And so we return to our standard monetary dialectic of concrete objects and their abstract representations—both playing against each other in a dance of hidden versus visible, stable versus mobile. A new carbon-banking infrastructure could catalyze a dispersed global army of people who could track down the carbon waste product that saturates our surroundings (it is even in the very air we breathe); they will then help to move it into hidden, stable hoards, where it will trigger the creation of chits that can then, in turn, create visible wealth, connected to, and supported by, the commons.

Such commons-wealth could be constituted of anything in which our communally owned banks choose to invest. Dead landscapes, destroyed by our own overexploitation of nature, could be transformed to regenerative grasslands, farm fields, and forests; in more urban districts, a jungle of carbon-sequestering skyscrapers might emerge, or an actual urban jungle might emerge, such as the one that divides Beirut today. Or consider the hellish plastics industry, which is virtually impossible for even the most dedicated climate activist to avoid; our banks could invest in local companies whose aim would be to replace our reliance on plastics. Our banks could also invest in the crucial public infrastructure needed to transition to a sustainable economy, which they would be spurred to invest in partly because of their mission and partly—alas—because of their dying hope that governments will ever lift a finger in this existential effort. In short, our banks could invest in all the elements of the economy that are needed to achieve an equitable, carbon-negative transition.

Such efforts would necessarily create new jobs for people boxed out of today’s economy. One of the core problems with the fight against climate change today is that it has not yet been able to draw on a standard division of labor that can help it to scale. Instead, we largely rely on an altruistic and philanthropic avant-garde which simply does not have the capacity to trigger systemic change. The division of labor—even for the left wing—is organized around the idea that you can safely agree to let an expert do the work on your behalf, at a better quality and better rate than you could ever achieve on your own. You could, perhaps, take years to train to be a doctor so that you could monitor your own health, but you have a day job that you like, and therefore prefer to find an expert who has chosen to undertake this vital training, while you pursued some other career training that you deemed vital to your own future.

In other words, the division of labor allows for a blossoming of systemic trust.¹⁵ To date, we have no one—including ourselves—whom we can trust in the climate battle. Do you have the time, energy, and expertise necessary to truly track your daily carbon footprint, much less reduce it? Do you really know what happens to the plastic bottle that you so vigilantly recycle? A carbon-banking system, communally owned by its depositors, would allow a vast array of experts to flourish, whom we could turn to—just as we turn to doctors for our personal health—to guide us through this necessary transformation to sustainability. Many of us could stay focused on our regular jobs, while a new generation of enthusiastic and dedicated climate fighters would rush into the opportunity created by carbon banking.

Currencies have utterly transformed the world before, as the cowrie shell so tragically demonstrates. With digital money, we have a new capacity to seize the power to name the deflationary—the sacred—valuable that we, collectively, choose to drive into hoards. Because of the vast errors of our ways, atmospheric carbon waste has become overly abundant, threatening life on earth as we know it today. We must therefore turn to humankind’s and nature’s longstanding, proven tactics for addressing abundance, in order to pull it out of the sky. At the same time, we must acknowledge the ongoing dialectic between this abundance and its opposite, scarcity, and how the two work together as an engine of the world. If we can socially produce the right level of scarcity for solid carbon, then the chits that represent it will forge a pathway for driving it back into the hidden hoards whence it came.

NOTES

1. We know that abundant cereal aisles are not necessarily the norm across the world. One only needs to remember the infamously empty shelves that Soviet and Eastern European consumers encountered. But the argument still stands that grocery stores are zones of pedagogy in scarcity, at least for the parents who have the luxury of going to well-stocked ones.

2. Please see Jonsson and Wennerlind’s book, Scarcity: A History from the Origins of Capitalism to the Climate Crisis, for a thorough investigation of the power of scarcity in our world.

3. See also chapter 2 of Shell 1993 for an argument that vernacular holy-grail sagas also navigate this spectrum from scarcity to abundance.

4. Peebles (2011) explores this in more detail.

5. Indeed, today there is a raging battle within economics about the causes of inflation during 2022–23. (see, e.g., Weber and Qi 2022; Weber and Schulken 2024).

6. Of course, if we read our lust for diamonds “mystically,” then perhaps they have been providing the hint all along that we should be trying to sequester carbon in safe vaults.

7. Without fixating on Gresham’s Law as such, Toby Green (2019) has relied on this distinction to map out the rise of colonial powers in Africa. See also Kuroda 2020.

8. In a further similarity with monetary policy, the CAP was criticized in previous decades because the EU then sold its “excess reserves” on the international market, dumping its cheap, subsidized dairy products on developing countries, thus forcing dairy producers out of the market in those local economies. This echoes not only the buying and selling of excess banking reserves but also the way in which empires have offloaded their own monetary crises onto colonial “hinterlands.” But the EU could have instead simply chosen to “kill” the hoard and let it rot. As long as, collectively, Europeans were willing to pay the price of storage, they would not need to harm local economies abroad. The CAP still supports farmers, but via new tactics that are decoupled from production. However, for our purposes, it is worth noting that they do maintain a subsidy program today that pays for the storage of goods that are in temporary oversupply. See European Commission, “Market Measures Explained,” accessed September 9, 2024, https://agriculture.ec.europa.eu/common-agricultural-policy/market-measures/market-measures-explained_en.

9. Needless to say, we are not endorsing all modes of hoarding and its dispersal. Excess housing “mistakenly” built by real-estate developers because they “misread” the market should, we believe, not be subsidized by governments. By mentioning the well known tactic of warehousing along with these other examples, we are merely pointing out that governments, private industries, and society at large have nimbly responded to the problems of abundance in the past.

10. We recognize, as did Keynes in his discussion of Gesell, that this policy would make Cords less attractive—in a purely economic sense—to potential users of the currency. But we nevertheless believe, based both on historical evidence and the looming climate catastrophe, that people may nevertheless be excited to join a currency community whose central task is to sequester carbon.

11. See the Great Depression–era book Storage and Security (Graham 1937) for a proposal from a highly respected economist that a monetary standard should be built upon a basket of surplus agricultural goods.

12. We offered ideas for how to police this vital issue in chapter 6.

13. We do, however, note here that gold and biochar share four of the five qualities that experts have said made gold so attractive as a foundation of currency systems: both are quantifiable, portable, divisible, and nondecaying. This chapter turns to the well-known history of the socially produced nature of scarcity to argue that we can work together to ensure that they also share the fifth vital quality: relative scarcity.

14. We recognize that our banks would have the dual tasks of managing monetary stability and incentivizing carbon sequestration. Under normal conditions, we believe these tasks would be harmonically aligned, but we leave it to our community-owned banks to navigate these issues if and when they arise. Again, we cannot make the perfect the enemy of the good at this stage in the climate fight.

15. See the important work concerning online trust being led by Dr. Sareeta Amrute: Data & Society, “Trustworthy Infrastructures,” accessed September 9, 2022, https://datasociety.net/research/trustworthy-infrastructures.

CONCLUSION: HOMEWARD BOUND

We are stardust

Billion-year-old carbon

We are golden

Caught in the devil’s bargain

And we’ve got to get ourselves

back to the garden

—Joni Mitchell, “Woodstock”

We understand how gravity operates, but we have no idea why it exists. Why do larger collectivities of atoms exert a pull on smaller collectivities of atoms? Why did the smaller collectivity escape the larger one’s grasp to begin with? Physicists don’t pretend to have an answer. Coming up short on the scientific front, perhaps it is high time that we “read” gravity mystically. For what is gravity but a “calling home”? Things that have been exiled, seeking to return home; the cast-off excess, always seeking to find unity with that which it left behind.

The origin is the goal.

Home, in this gravitational sense, exerts a pull, across countless traditions, mythologies, and even real-world events. Nineteenth- and twentieth-century population movements could be read “gravitationally”: The “surplus labor” of “old worlds”—migrants and enslaved people alike from Africa, Asia, and Europe—all longed for home after being transported (by force or by choice) to the so-called “New World.” Some cycled back, but far more dreamt of return, keeping the flame of a mythical home alive in their hearts for centuries, (partly) identifying still today with their distant heritage. Continuing with this metaphor—or Swedenborgian correspondence—those who stayed achieved “escape velocity,” building new homes in new places that exert, to this day, their own gravitational pulls.

The growth and decline of an individual human life also mimics this same trajectory. Hence the prayer, recounted at many funerals, “We therefore commit this body to the ground, earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.” Less poetically, a baby strives upward and outward, just like a tree, pulling unto itself countless atoms and molecules that become part of it as it grows. Years later, as the body creeps toward senescence, its gravitational force diminishes, more easily allowing these atoms and molecules to achieve escape velocity and to find new homes. Beyond these brute physical laws, the human who lives through this multi-year oscillation often finds herself also literally returning home: economic migrants often retire in their countries or states of origin; dads and moms in their dotage often move into their children’s houses.

At a more cosmic time scale, planets and stars experience the same phenomenon. They have a moment of birth, when they pull matter toward themselves, to facilitate their growth. Billions of years after accreting these vast assemblages of matter and energy, it too is exiled, sent away to find a new home.

As above, so below.

The list could go on.

Throughout this book, we have argued that we need to read banking and its currency-issuance capacity “mystically” in this way too. For the vast majority of currencies throughout history, there is always an inalienable possession (aka, a reserve) with a gravitational pull, beseeching exiled chits to return “home.” At the same time, these chits wander, challenging this gravitational pull and probing the possibility of building new inalienable possessions to call home. The chits move quickly, and the inalienable possession moves slowly, just like electrons rapidly dancing around a central nucleus. Ambitious new inalienable possessions try to become their own centers of gravity, refusing the pull of their origins. But achieving escape velocity is typically only a tantalizing mirage, and accounting ledgers trace deep and entangled commitments to home.¹

In sum, the striving for life (even metaphorical life) entails gravitational pulls, directing matter toward attempted new “homes.” Meanwhile, the opposite of home—of gravity, in our metaphor—cannot be ignored. Repulsion forces matter into exile, wandering until it returns or finds a new home. The accumulation of wealth by the very rich can be seen in this way: they desperately try to agglomerate more and more chits to their hoard–cum–inalienable possession, and they try to fend off the forces of gravity that always tries to call the chits home to their origin. The private mound of capital, detached from its surrounding forces of repulsion and declaring itself master of its own domain, offers the false promise of a new and eternal home. But it too will dissipate, in time.

In 1907, a Maori elder named Ranapiri encapsulated much of this when he wrote a letter to a local anthropologist in New Zealand. The anthropologist had queried the Maori chief about common rituals of rat-snatching and bird-snaring in the forest. Surprisingly, Ranapiri responded with a discursus on negotiated exchange, not violent seizure. He told the anthropologist of the “hau of the forest”—a spirit infused in all things at their birth, but which always seeks to return home. It can circulate for a time and can be passed from hand-to-hand, but ultimately, the hau must return via sacrificial offering, and woe betide anyone who tries to keep the hau from its origin by neglecting this offering. Redeeming this hau—returning it to its point of origin—is not merely a sacred duty. It is positively dangerous to work against its existential pull (see Henare 2018 and Mauss 1990).

Seen from the standpoint of Euro-American economics, Ranapiri’s offering was a fee for withdrawal, unnecessarily increasing the cost of taking the bird by invoking superstitious niceties. Seen from the standpoint of mysticism, the hau of the forest was simply being returned to its home, respecting the unavoidable forces of attraction and repulsion that had set it in motion. Seen from the standpoint of nature itself, the Maori hunter was feeding the forest, just as it had fed him. He was giving back some of the energy he had taken, ensuring that the worms could eat a carcass that otherwise would have achieved escape velocity and left the forest. Ranapiri undertook this extra work because he could see—empirically and mystically—what we have been blind to for far too long.²

Ranapiri could also see that the forest would punish him if he failed to return the hau. But we do not seem to heed this same simple lesson. We have seized carbon out of its subterranean abode, caused it to achieve escape velocity, and thereby violently separated it from its home. Unjustly exiled and removed from its own cycle of life and death, this atmospheric carbon is now being called home. Carbon’s “language” to inform us of our unjust seizure is temperature and cataclysm—powerful indexes of meaning, should we choose to hear carbon’s plaintive demand.

Should we choose to ignore the pleas of carbon’s hau, we now know that punishment awaits. Should we choose to listen, we must follow Ranapiri’s suggested pathway, returning carbon to the earth whence it came, with agentive, conscious action on our own part. We have proposed that a carbon-backed currency can be one tool for facilitating this gravitational call to home, for, as we have shown, currency itself also mimics this same system of attraction and repulsion. Currency could simply be “overlaid” upon the needed movement of carbon itself, by labeling it as a crucial, life-giving, inalienable possession. New, solidified, and guarded hoards would be built, while abstract chits would circulate.

Earth is, in this way, the first bank. Or rather, a regular bank merely gropingly attempts to mimic the forces of attraction and repulsion that we see elsewhere in nature (as we explained in chapter 1). But bankers and fossil fuel companies, in their hubris, have attempted to achieve their own escape velocity, trying to artificially separate us from our true home while building a new—but unsustainable—attraction/repulsion mechanism detached from nature. The gravitational pull of carbon is now teaching us otherwise, reminding us that the earth must also become the last bank.

In this scenario, as with humankind’s central banks, the earth itself would become the cornerstone of the vast chain of interlinked promises that currency represents. The central hoard around which all abstract value swirls would be the hau of carbon, finally returned home.

In this sense, a carbon-backed currency could be our new sacrificial offering, returning the hau that we tried to so callously remove. During the era of the gold standard, humanity returned gold to its home in sequestered vaults, as if by magic. And Ranapiri’s efforts also appeared as magic to the uninitiated anthropologist. We know now that his offerings are merely the agentive actions of a conscious geoengineer—the Maori chief has taken, but he must also give back. It is the wisdom of the ages, and a carbon-backed currency could be our new magic.

Of course, it is the opposite of magic, just as Ranapiri’s efforts were. Magic appeals typically with the promise of an all-too-easy “wave of the hand,” whereas Ranapiri’s supposed magic required thoughtful, laborious work; his actions acknowledged laws of nature with which our science has only recently reckoned.³ So too with a carbon-backed currency, which we have explained is the very opposite of the deus ex machina for which we all seem to be waiting. Initiating and sustaining a carbon-backed currency would take equally thoughtful and laborious work.

By undertaking this work, we would be building a garden planet. Not in the sense of Adam and Eve’s doltish Garden, where knowledge was jealously guarded by God in exchange for effortless abundance. And not in the sense that all would blossom green, either. But a garden planet in the sense of tending, as Ranapiri did in his native forest. A good garden is the transcendent collaboration of humanity and nature, what Kimmerer calls “a kind of mutual taming” (2013, 124). A good garden is a carefully and consciously tended plot that recognizes and respects the laws of nature; the cycle of birth, death, and rebirth; and the powerful call of home. Right now, we treat our planet as a zone of brute extraction, actively facilitating the force of exile/repulsion while actively working against the force of home/gravity; indeed, considering how we treat it, we can barely dignify our earth with the term “home.”

And so, for our final epigraph, we have chosen the eerily prophetic lyrics of Joni Mitchell, imploring us “to get ourselves back to the garden.”

Because the origin is the goal.

NOTES

1. Giovanni Arrighi’s The Long 20th Century (2010) could be re-read in this mystical fashion without much trouble. Capitalism begins in Genoa, but traipses its way through Amsterdam, London, and New York. Those leaps to new capitals of capitalism are moments of new “home-building” that result from true escape velocity, but the centuries leading to these leaps attest to the deep threads that bind capital across these territories.

2. This raises the possibility that “hau” is but another name for “gravity.” That is, Ranipiri’s religious teachings understood the force of gravity just as well as Newton’s science, but the Maori elder simply employed a different register to express this force.

3. Without referring to the story of Ranapiri, Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass argues this same idea, both beautifully and convincingly.

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INDEX

Note: Page numbers in italics refer to figures.

Abundance, 34–35, 49, 134, 226–228, 233, 240–241, 267n9

of carbon, 34, 49, 154, 174, 193, 227–228, 237

monetary, 35, 228–231, 238–239

in nature, 226, 228–229

as problem, 35, 49, 235

regulating, 230

and scarcity, 227, 241, 258n20, 259n3

systemic, 226

Accountability, 198, 202

Accounting, 74, 177–179, 198, 263n2

Accreditation, 25, 188, 195. See also Assaying; Verification

Accumulation, 119–120, 123, 185, 215, 235, 259n2

asset, 154

carbon, 11, 49, 76, 79, 139

individual, 185

primitive, 83

wealth, 245

Afforestation, 77, 170, 201

Agriculture, 43, 72–73, 77, 198, 233–235, 259n3, 264n16

commodities, 35

industrial, 72

regenerative, 72, 170–171, 201, 264n16

Alchemy, 20, 21, 36, 41, 155, 252n21, 259n26

Alienation, 31, 120, 181

Altruism, 185, 240. See also Philanthropy

Anthropocene, 63

Anthropology, 70, 86, 185, 229

“Anti-runs,” 91, 104, 164, 167

Appadurai, Arjun, 86

Appropriation, 26, 130–132, 255n19, 259n24

Arbitrage, 108, 168, 175, 208, 212, 238, 255n19

Argentina, 57–58, 60, 116, 132, 222

Artificial

scarcity, 265n6

vaults, 22, 41, 44, 156

Assaying, 157, 190. See also Verification

gold, 22, 25, 90, 145, 157, 220

sequestered carbon, 48, 156, 187–189, 192, 201

Assets

stranded, 162

toxic, 7, 34–35, 134, 234–235

Atmospheric carbon, 11, 48, 76, 138, 141, 148, 157, 196, 262n1. See also Greenhouse gas emissions

as profane, 19

removal of, 76 (see also Carbon sequestration)

sacralizing, 3–4, 15

as waste, 45

Bad actors, 191–194

Bagehot, Walter, 102, 133–134

Bank Charter Act of 1844 (UK), 96–98, 209

Banking

access to, 21, 23, 122

as biomimicry, 35–39, 152–153, 152–155, 216–217, 227, 230–231, 246, 251n18, 259n3

commons, 15, 50, 117–136

democratization of, 23, 93–94, 122, 135

gravitational, 47, 84, 92, 119, 244

infrastructure, 21–22, 51, 62, 70, 156–157, 168–169, 176, 218–220, 239, 250n4

metaphors, 36, 38–39

regulation, 6, 58–59, 69–70, 78, 89–90, 163, 173, 180, 209, 221

as sacred, 18, 95–96, 259n26

suspicions of, 135–136

trust in, 218–219

Bank of Amsterdam, 91, 112

Bank of England, 16, 17, 97–99, 102–103, 118, 133, 165, 174

as national hoard, 127

Bank of France, 106

Bank of International Settlements (BIS), 174–175, 251n16, 262n24

Bank runs, 27, 86, 92, 121, 125–126, 169–170

central, 115–117

private, 116–117

as tragedy of the commons, 126

Bankruptcy, 20, 27, 92, 130, 133, 254n8

Banks, 17

architecture of, 18, 95

as collective institutions, 20, 113, 115–136, 155, 160

cooperative, 19, 183, 188, 190

grassroots, 29

hatred of, 6

as invisible, 169

national (see Central banks)

of nature, 37–38, 251n18

as stewards, 24

and temples, 30–31, 181, 259n25

as temples, 18, 95–96

Baptizing, 62–63, 253n6

carbon, 20, 63, 70

Basic-income experiments, 230

Bataille, Georges, 42–43, 88

Benjamin, Walter, 36, 45

Bensel, Richard Franklin, 161

Bernanke, Ben, 35

Biochar, 25, 70, 77, 112–113, 142–149, 157–158, 201, 236, 250n6

arbitrage, 168, 175

cycle, 75, 140–141

excess, 112, 165, 167

hard, 168

history of, 144

hoards, 158

production, 144–145, 148, 236, 250n6 (see also Pyrolysis)

as regenerative, 144

as reserves, 48, 50, 74–75, 142, 158–160, 164–168

transporting, 165, 168

value of, 164, 168, 170–171

Biofuel, 140, 157–158, 192, 201, 260n14

Biomimicry, 44, 73, 75, 144, 217, 259n3, 260n4

banking as, 35–39, 152–155, 216–217, 227, 230–231, 246, 251n18, 259n3

conscious, 154–155

failed, 35–36, 39, 251n18

flawed, 227

Biowaste, 144–145

Bitcoin, 54–55, 189, 211–212, 215–216, 219–221, 237–238, 257n6, 266n10. See also Cryptocurrency

environmental impact, 221–222

mining, 219–220, 220, 238

as store of value, 219

Blake, William, 41, 43

Bloch, Ernst, 5, 62

Blockchain, 48, 219, 265n6. See also Cryptocurrency

Bretton Woods system, 99, 107–111, 256n30

Brownfields, 75, 167, 187–188

Bryan, William Jennings, 228

Bundesbank, 96

Business ethics, 163

Capital, 14, 15, 78, 83, 125, 214, 239, 245, 253n11

controls, 108, 168, 261n17

human, 214

local, 65

seed, 20, 36, 159–160

social, 135

Capital, 135

Capitalism, 39, 43, 64, 107, 135, 180, 255n16, 268n1

and commons, 259n27

nature in, 39

Capitalist ideology, 182

Carbon, 2, 143. See also Sequestered carbon

abundance of, 34, 49, 154, 174, 193, 227–228, 237

accumulation, 11, 49, 79, 139 (see also Atmospheric carbon)

baptizing, 20, 63, 70

as black gold, 50

consumption, 68, 78, 79 (see also Carbon, footprint)

credits, 2, 18, 27, 31–34, 179

as currency of nature, 38, 50–51, 151, 154

debt, 195

decommodifying, 33–34

drawdown, 7, 19, 77, 156, 167, 179 (see also Carbon sequestration)

fixed, 74–75

footprint, 31, 68–69, 161, 164, 168, 170, 236, 240

as inalienable possession, 18–19, 47, 51, 154, 180

“language” of, 246

market value, 71, 74, 216

as monetary base, 223

monitoring, 191

as nature’s currency, 50, 151

offsets, 32, 148, 194 (see also Carbon, credits)

privatization of, 194–195

quantifying, 191, 192

reliance on, 224

sacralizing, 51, 63, 70, 84, 156, 195, 238

standards, 79, 187, 237

sterilization, 112–113

suspended, 74–75, 145

as talisman, 71

terrestrial, 194–195

theft of, 154, 171, 177

as toxic asset, 7, 235

as trash, 2, 24, 45, 62, 70

value of, 70

waste, 25, 41, 44, 138–139, 148, 240

Carbon banks, 7, 24, 157, 196–197

assayers, 187–189, 191–193 (see also Verifiers)

assets, 74–75, 112–113, 142, 154, 158, 165–167, 169–171, 257n34

central, 172–173

as communally owned, 25, 157, 160, 162, 183, 191

currency (see Cords)

depositors, 159, 160, 165, 172

exchange rates, 174–175

funding for, 122, 160–161, 187–188, 255n14

governance of, 27, 40, 191

infrastructure, 69–70, 187, 239

as international, 174–175

labor of, 24, 30, 185–192

liabilities, 25, 169–170, 257n34

loans, 69, 159–160, 166, 170–171, 181, 193

local, 159–160, 181, 185–186, 191, 196–198, 222

mission of, 2–3, 160, 164, 167, 234, 238

and monetary policy, 173–174

natural, 38–40, 49, 152

network of, 161, 164–165, 172, 174

as pragmatic, 30–31

regulation of, 172–173

reserves, 164–166 (see also Biochar, as reserves)

runs on, 164–165

as sequestration machines, 33

stability, 175

trust in, 27–28, 165–167, 180

Carbon Commons, 4–5, 11, 15, 24, 38, 51, 136, 158, 217

defense of, 191

Carbon currency, 5, 8, 148, 201. See also Cords

chain of promises, 221

exchange rates, 174

formalizing, 69–70

issuing of, 25, 111–112, 140–141, 148–149, 161, 171, 173–174, 222

and liquidity, 74, 112, 142, 151, 158, 161, 164

management of, 4, 27, 50–51, 167

as pegged, 221

soundness of, 148, 190–193

as stablecoin, 217, 221–222, 266n6

Carbon cycle, 75, 138, 140, 143, 156–157

fast, 140, 143, 151–152, 155

slow, 152, 155

Carbon sequestration, 2, 7, 8, 15, 27, 74, 77, 79, 141, 142, 148–149, 181, 196. See also Sequestered carbon

fraud, 190–192

as mitzvah, 45–46

Cassel, Gustav, 100

Cataclysm, 84, 86, 96, 116, 246

Central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), 211–212, 218, 259n23

Central banks, 65, 92–93, 96, 98, 126–127, 169, 172, 190, 209, 213

administration, 127–129

as commons, 119, 121, 130–132 (see also Banking, commons)

as dealer of last resort, 134

decommodified, 132

development of, 92

governance of, 131–132

as “invisible,” 128

as lender of last resort, 133–134

as magical, 133–134

natural and artificial, 54

ownership of, 117–118, 127–128, 130, 175–176

runs on, 115–117, 116

as sacred, 134 (see also Banks, as temples)

standardization, 103–104

as stewards, 118, 131, 133

as talisman, 115, 121

Certified Emission Reduction Units, 32. See also Carbon, credits

Chain of promises, 56–57, 58, 193, 214, 216, 218, 220, 220–221, 246

Chits, 16, 24, 36, 46, 112, 198, 211, 213, 232, 244

Circular economy, 76, 170, 171

Civilization, 82, 144

Class, 87, 90

Climate

action, 62, 76, 179, 232

catastrophe, 1, 32, 71, 111, 132, 136, 194

change, 15, 45–46, 136, 141–142, 161

transition, 8, 25–27, 69, 145, 171, 240

as ultimate concern, 29–31, 158

Clipping coins, 93–94

CO₂. See Atmospheric carbon

Coal, 139, 142, 152, 177, 262n1

Collateralized debt obligations (CDOs), 34–35

Colonialism, 78, 82–83, 88, 98–99, 104, 154, 224

Commodification, 15, 94, 179. See also Decommodification

Commodity, 3, 24, 34, 208, 211, 266n12

vs. gift, 185

gold as, 89, 95–96, 105

and inalienable possessions, 15, 17

money, 173, 212, 216, 221, 232

Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), 49, 233–234, 267n8

Commoners, 131–132, 133, 184, 191

Commoning, 126, 136, 158–159

Common-pool resources (CPRs), 47, 58–61, 117, 119, 120, 136, 224

as non-excludable, 120–121

vs. public goods, 252n3, 253n5, 257n2

as rivalrous, 120–121

as sacred, 61

Commons, 4–5, 27, 119

building, 121–122, 135

and capitalism, 259n27

currency in, 249n4

defense of, 183

destruction of, 121–122 (see also Privatization)

as disappearing, 117–118

financial, 118

governance of, 26, 30, 40, 118, 131–132, 229

as invisible, 224

labor in, 186–187 (see also Gatekeepers; Stewards; Verifiers)

as “living organism,” 136

magic of, 133

management of, 185

natural-resource, 123, 125

nature of, 124

as neutral, 135

organizational structure, 184

participation in, 158–159

privatization of, 121–122, 183, 259n22

stereotypes of, 121

tragedy of, 59, 126, 252n1

use of, 131 (see also Commoners)

wealth of, 239–240

Commons-based banking, 15, 27–29. See also Carbon banks

localized, 27–28

Community, 17, 34, 61, 63, 68, 121, 181, 191

activism, 65

currencies (see Complementary currency)

as inalienable possession, 66, 67

infrastructure, 224

more-than-human, 37–38

values of, 178

Competition, 39, 61, 100, 105

Complementary currency, 28, 47, 64–71, 159, 176

infrastructure of, 31, 70

Compliance markets, 31–32

Consumption, 60, 163, 208, 215

carbon, 68, 78, 79 (see also Carbon, footprint)

Cooperative banks, 19, 183, 188, 190

Cooperatives, 23, 26, 184

Cords, 159–60, 161–163, 170, 175, 181, 232, 234, 236, 237–239, 260n11, 262n24

Corporations, 1, 6, 28, 32, 136, 176, 179, 191, 194–195

as bad actors, 194

Correspondences, 36, 39, 40–41, 151, 217, 244

Cosmic

theft, 49–50, 171, 177–179

time, 151–152, 244

Counterfeiting, 93–94, 193, 220, 265n1

Country banks, 96–97

COVID-19, 128, 159, 190

Cowrie currency, 53–55, 63, 70, 176, 253n7

and sequestration, 54

Credit, 16–17, 91, 135, 152, 264n16

unions, 160, 171, 183, 261n19

Credit/debt relationship, 120, 185

Crime, 50, 177. See also Theft

Cryptocurrency, 48–49, 66, 207–224, 250n7, 266n12

as decentralized, 219

issuance, 219

as peer-to-peer, 218–219

as tool, 218

value of, 212

verification, 220–222

Culture

of gratitude, 184–185

of reciprocity, 184–185

viral, 208

Currency, 8, 207–209, 246

alternative, 132

attacks on, 117

as biomimicry, 217

catalyzing, 54

as chain of promises, 56–57, 246

circulating, 120

collapse, 57

in the commons, 249n4

conversion, 170, 210

convertibility, 104

crises, 116–117, 120, 128, 130, 169, 217 (see also Bank runs)

devaluation, 86

as “disappearing,” 60

experiments, 39, 155, 213, 213–214

failures of, 178, 194

functions of, 57–58, 178

as goal-directed, 46

hegemony, 210

instability, 60

as intelligent structure, 176

as invisible, 22

issuance, 23, 46, 111

“joke,” 208

“lawless,” 55, 70

losing faith in, 62

management, 62

“more-than-human,” 36

national, 58–59 (see also Central banks)

nationalization of, 126–127

private, 96–97

as social relationship, 56–57

stability, 60, 133, 233

successful, 208–209

“true,” 209

unions, 111, 256n33

unit of account, 175

weirdness of, 55, 213

Cynicism, 27, 180, 180–182, 182, 222

Death, 43–44

Decommodification, 3–4, 24, 94–96, 132–133, 179

of carbon, 33–34

Deflation, 219, 231, 235

and inflation, 231–233

Deforestation, 139, 177

Degrowth, 30

Demand, 162–163, 238

Demoralization, 8, 176. See also Cynicism

Demurrage, 66, 214, 235–236

Derrida, Jacques, 231

Digital currency, 94, 155, 162–163, 168, 189, 210, 212, 217–218, 236, 250n7. See also Cryptocurrency

legitimacy of, 220

Direct air capture, 19, 76

Distributed ledger, 189, 219, 220

Dogecoin, 207–208, 220. See also Bitcoin; Cryptocurrency

Dollarization, 210

Doughnut economics, 29

Drawdown, 19, 156, 167

measuring, 180 (see also Verification)

quantifying, 179–180

Duncan, Henry, 122–123

Durkheim, Émile, 61

Earth, 200. See also Climate; Ecologies; Nature

as first bank, 36, 40, 51, 152, 246

as last bank, 51, 245

as sacred, 186

Easements, 166, 192

Ecologies, 78–79, 141, 180, 202. See also Nature

local, 27–29, 32–33, 51, 79, 148, 158, 172, 197–198, 222

Economics (discipline), 55, 156, 179, 185, 215, 229–230

Economy, 3, 41, 229

circular, 76, 170, 171

human, 50

natural, 34, 37

profane, 2, 132, 134

regenerative, 28–29

sustainable, 239–240, 240

Ecosystems, 202, 204. See also Ecologies

Egypt, 113

El Dorado, 88–89

Enclosure, 125, 132, 136. See also Privatization

Environment. See Nature

Environmentalism, 163

Eurodollars, 212

European Association of Co-operative Banks, 19

European Biochar Certificate, 187

European Union, 32, 233–234, 267n8

Excess, 37–38, 42–44, 54, 62, 164, 234–235. See also Abundance

carbon, 151–152, 156, 201

generative, 88

reserves, 267n8

unwanted, 227–228, 243

Exchange, 232, 245

bureaus, 57

theory, 15

Exchange rates, 108, 174–175

fixed, 108, 174

flexible, 174

floating, 107

Excludability, 120–121

Executive Order 6102 (US), 105–106

Experts, 25, 129, 158, 189, 221–222, 224, 240

External object, 214–216

Extraction, 78–79, 139, 156, 247

gold, 82–83, 88–89

Faith, 3, 17, 30, 78–79, 215. See also Trust

in currency, 57, 62, 66

loss of, 26–27, 194

Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), 169

Federici, Silvia, 122

Feedstock, 143, 145, 147, 158, 159, 192, 236, 239. See also Biochar; Carbon, waste

Fee-simple ownership, 123, 130, 135

Fetishism, 93

Fetishization, 67, 106–107, 214–215, 228

Fiat, 21, 106, 174

money, 211, 258n11

system, 86, 92, 125, 253n12

Flow, 37, 85, 216–217, 251n14

of money, 36–37, 129–131, 258n20

Forced inflation, 235. See Demurrage

Forest Metrix, 187

Forests, 36–38, 77, 180–181, 183, 192

as banking systems, 37–38

as bank reserves, 165–166

Fort Knox, 13–15, 20–21, 49–50, 81–82, 84, 96, 250n1

creation of, 106

as hoard, 14–15

as metaphor, 13, 81

as temple, 20, 22, 106

49’ers, 82, 253n1. See also Gold Rush

Fossil fuel deposits, 45, 49, 112, 139, 149, 151–154, 156

as inalienable possessions, 151–154

as vaults, 151

Fossil fuels, 5, 44–45, 49–50, 69, 76, 139, 148, 195, 201, 262n1, 264n13

drilling, 194–195

economy, 188, 196

industry, 162, 246

Fractional-reserve banking, 117, 188, 217, 266n8

Fraud, 27, 32, 134, 157, 190–192

Free

banking, 121, 258n18

labor, 161–162, 182, 186, 263n5

market, 17, 58, 60–61, 99, 104, 173

trade, 104, 161

“Free-rider” problem, 59, 120–121

Freud, Sigmund, 42, 70

Fullarton, John, 97, 127, 135, 166

Gatekeepers, 4, 59, 131–132, 136, 184, 191

Genocide, 55. See also Slavery

Geoengineering, 30, 76, 145, 177, 200, 247

Gesell, Silvio, 66–68, 213–214, 235–236

Gifts, 185–186. See also Philanthropy; Tithing

Global Carbon Reward, 32, 32–33, 261n21. See also Carbon, credits

Globalization, 54–55, 65, 214

Goetzman, William, 63

Gold, 13–14, 166, 174, 246, 254n4

assaying, 22, 25, 90, 145, 157, 220

as collateral, 97–99

as commodity, 89, 95–96, 105

convertibility, 96–97, 102, 104, 108–109

decommodified, 96, 109

deflation of, 233, 237

demonetized, 109

devices, 98, 99

drains, 91, 111

export bans, 93, 102, 105, 211

extraction, 82–83, 88–89

fetishization, 106–107

as gravitropic, 47, 83–84, 254n7

hoarding, 10, 15, 83, 92 (see also Fort Knox)

imagery of, 81–82

love of, 15, 88

as magical, 83, 85–86

metaphysics of, 83–84

mining, 13–14, 22, 40–41, 89, 99, 174, 219

as mystical, 84, 100–101

nationalization, 105–106

and power, 85

production, 106–107, 109

purified, 83

run on, 105

as sacred, 7, 95–96

sequestration, 2, 7, 22, 24, 47, 78, 233

sterilization, 104–105, 112–113

trading, 90

trust in, 212

value of, 100–101

Gold Pool, 109

Gold Reserve Act (US), 106

Gold Rush, 81–82, 253n1

Gold standard, 18, 22, 83, 101, 232–233

as beta test, 22–23, 22–23, 78, 79, 84, 111–112

critiques of, 53

deflation of, 237

end of, 14, 100, 106

international, 96–99, 110, 157, 165

in US, 103

Governance, 239, 252n2

of carbon banks, 27, 40, 191

of central banks, 131–132

“civil,” 82

of commons, 26, 30, 40, 118, 131–132, 229

polycentric, 129

Government, 1, 27–28, 59–60, 101, 111–112, 136, 173–176, 180, 194, 222, 235

abandonment, 64, 174

as bad actor, 194

corrupt, 6

failure, 173, 186, 261n16

irresponsibility, 176

neglect, 163, 174

regulation, 31, 180

spending, 224

Graham, Benjamin, 35

Gravitational banking, 47, 84, 92, 119, 244

Gravity, 216–217, 243–245

Great Depression, 65, 105

Greed, 46, 120, 192, 218

Greedflation, 35

Green, Toby, 88

Green Bonds, 166–167

Greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs), 28, 72, 139, 145

Green Markets (New York City), 157

Greenwashing, 164, 167, 180, 181

Gresham’s Law, 24–25, 67, 83, 87, 154, 231–232, 251n10

Hau, 245–246

Hayek, Friedrich, 173

Hierarchy, 24, 37–39, 90, 104, 155, 172–173, 183–184

Hoarding, 42, 119–120, 235, 254n4

carbon, 15, 24

gold, 15, 83, 92

hatred of, 214

inalienable possessions, 18, 42

as social, 120

sterile, 124

transactions, 215

Hoards, 119. See also Private hoards

archives as, 119, 257n4

breaking up, 86, 250n3

communal, 123, 233

“dead,” 50, 120, 239

magic of, 120, 123–124

national, 100, 127

ownership of, 128

personal, 118

sacred, 16–18, 28, 34, 113 (see also Inalienable possessions)

“satellite,” 127

selfish, 125

as talisman, 120

Holmes, Douglas, 130

Home, 2, 49, 85, 243–247

Hope, 5, 22–23, 179, 195

Hopelessness, 31, 179, 194. See also Cynicism

House of Trade, 90–91

Humanity

and nature, 247

oneness with nature, 21, 37, 154

as separate from nature, 21, 50, 67, 152–153, 235

Humanity-in-nature, 50

Hume, David, 104, 174

Hyperinflation, 35, 54, 60, 130, 134, 209, 230–233

Inalienable possessions, 15–17, 33, 85–87, 94, 133

carbon as, 18–19, 47, 51, 154, 180

choice of, 49

and commodities, 15, 17

contested, 68

as contested, 93

creating, 64

gravity of, 244–245

hoarding, 18, 42

as living force, 63

personal, 118

power of, 215

as priceless, 16

India, 18, 98–99, 184, 250n3

Indigenous

land stewardship, 4, 77, 124, 201

monetary system, 154

peoples, 83, 88

religion, 19

science, 229

wisdom, 49

Individualism, 218, 222–224

Industrial Revolution, 78, 97, 135, 139, 148, 201

Inequality, 37, 39, 231

Inflation, 104, 109, 131, 219, 227, 230, 261n17

and deflation, 231–233

forced, 235

international, 103

Informal banking, 69–70

Infrastructure, 22, 31, 38

banking, 21–22, 51, 62, 70, 156–157, 168–169, 176, 218–220, 239, 250n4

carbon banks, 69–70, 239

community, 224

of complementary currency, 31, 70

public, 239–240

social, 222, 224

Interest rates, 115, 123, 125, 168, 174, 214, 255n16

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), 19, 142

International Biochar Initiative, 187

International Carbon Action Partnership, 32

International Monetary Fund (IMF), 175, 234, 256n31, 262n25

creation of, 107–108

Investigative journalism, 189

Islamic finance, 165

Ithaca Hours, 65

Japan, 99, 101–102

“Judo-finance,” 21, 263n3

Keynes, John Maynard, 42, 43, 53, 66, 68, 107–108, 125, 255n16

Kimmerer, Robin Wall, 20, 38, 63, 124, 153, 184–185, 228, 247

Kinship, 50, 63, 83

Know your customer (KYC), 163, 192

Kohn, Eduardo, 36, 50

Kyoto units, 32. See also Carbon, credits

Labor, 40–41, 89, 158–159

in commons, 186–187

communal, 181

division of, 240

free, 161–162, 182, 186, 263n5

gifted, 186

human, 222

ritualistic, 184, 186

social, 15, 57, 63

volunteer, 23, 182–183, 184, 186

Land enclosure, 122

Language

and money, 56–57

religious, 40

as verification regime, 195

“Lawless” currency, 55, 70

Legislation, 6, 8, 33, 47, 50, 94, 190. See also Government

Linebaugh, Peter, 158–159, 224

Liquidity, 22, 36, 58, 97, 103, 232–233

and carbon currency, 74, 112, 142, 151, 158, 161, 164

preference, 43, 68, 125

Loans, 125, 166, 193

bad, 193–194

carbon bank, 69, 159–160, 166, 170–171, 181, 193

Lobbying, 6, 31–32, 50. See also Legislation

Local

communities, 51, 111, 176

ecologies, 27–29, 32–33, 51, 79, 148, 158, 172, 197–198, 222

economies, 65, 160–161, 215

Local currency, 160–161, 168, 176, 179, 213–215, 260n13. See also Complementary currency

and banking, 69

Local Exchange Trading Systems. See Complementary currency; Local currency

Magic, 1, 41, 83–84, 246–247

of central banks, 133–134

of commons, 133

of gold, 83, 85–86

of hoards, 120, 123–124

of inalienable possessions, 16

of money, 22, 35–36, 63–64, 70, 101

sympathetic, 36–37, 251n13

Malm, Andreas, 5

Marginal utility, 228, 232

Market, 4, 39, 83, 212

compliance, 31–32

failure, 121

free, 17, 58, 60–61, 99, 104, 173

interbank, 213

power, 46

private, 14, 32, 136

voluntary, 31–32

Marx, Karl, 43, 66, 83, 127, 135

Mauss, Marcel, 185

Mercantilism, 93, 107

Metaphors, 36. See also Correspondences

Milling coins, 93

Mining

bitcoin, 219–220, 220, 238

gold, 13–14, 22, 40–41, 89, 99, 174, 219

Mission-driven banking, 2–3, 6, 19, 23, 124, 165

Mitigation, 136, 148, 196, 201

Mitzvot, 45–46, 184

Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), 55, 228, 251n14, 254n9, 259n2

Mondragon, 183–184

Monetary

policy, 5, 14, 34, 173–174, 210, 219, 230–231

sterilization, 91

Monetary base, 134, 210, 213, 223. See also Reserves

carbon as, 223

democratization of, 93–94, 223

as fetish, 215

as inalienable possession, 210–211

Money, 62–68, 226

as abstract, 55–56

abundance of, 35, 228–231, 238–239

as arbitrary, 56–57

“bad,” 24, 87

commodity, 173, 212, 216, 221, 232

converting, 17, 109, 210

deflationary, 219

famine, 65, 228, 231, 237, 238–239

flow of, 36–37, 129–131, 258n20

functions of, 57–58

“good,” 24, 87

“intrinsic,” 212

and language, 56–57

magic of, 22, 35–36, 63–64, 70, 101

as mystical, 35–36

as pharmakon, 222–223

power of, 6, 21–22, 133, 217

printing, 134, 173, 260n10

private, 209, 212

public, 212

as relationship, 251n14

scarcity of, 35–36, 229–230

sound, 22, 97, 111, 191, 212

“stateless,” 211

study of, 55 (see also Economics)

temporality of, 62

token, 87–88, 254n9

unhoardable, 214

Moore, Jason, 39, 258n3

Mysticism, 19, 35–36, 37, 38, 39–42, 45, 216, 218, 245

Nakamoto, Satoshi, 219–220. See also Bitcoin

National currency, 47, 116, 118, 121, 169, 176. See also Central banks

as commons, 117

as CPR, 120

metaphysics of, 117

as talisman, 115

National hoards, 100–101, 127

Nations, 116–117, 174. See also Government

Natural

carbon banks, 38–40, 49, 152

economy, 34, 37

gas, 177

vaults, 22, 41, 49–50, 79, 151–152, 156, 177

Natural Economic Order, The, 66, 213

Nature, 20–21, 36–37, 154, 260n7

abundance in, 226, 228–229

banking system, 37–38, 153, 251n18 (see also Carbon cycle)

as boundless, 40

in capitalism, 39

as Other, 50, 83

resacralizing, 1

as ultimate concern, 29–30, 158

value of, 50

waste in, 43–44

Neoliberalism, 14, 168, 180

Newton, Isaac, 41, 259n26, 268n2

Nixon, Richard M., 14, 106, 256n32

Nonhumans, 36, 124. See also Nature

“Not Yet,” 5–6, 8

Oil, 45, 50, 139, 177, 262n1. See also Fossil fuels

Onondaga Nation, 184–186, 228–229

Optimal currency zones, 175

Ostrom, Elinor, 4, 26, 118–119, 129–131, 172, 173

Overissuance, 86, 193

Ownership, 19, 92, 128, 130, 175–176, 191

fee-simple, 123, 130, 135

“fuzzy,” 175–176

private, 4, 47, 118

of reserves, 127–128

Paradox, 20

of thrift, 43

water-diamond, 228

Peer-to-peer lending, 189

Permissionless consensus, 220. See also Bitcoin

Pessimism, 192. See also Cynicism

Pharmakon, 222–223

Philanthropy, 23, 29, 122, 170, 187, 240

Phillips Curve, 230

Platform. See also Wikipedia

army, 181–183

cooperativism, 184

Poe, Edgar Allan, 216–217, 266n7

Polluters, 68, 163, 260n14

Polycentric governance, 129

Pooled Timber Income Funds, 166

Poverty, 238–239. See also Inequality

Power, 87, 99, 105, 155, 176, 190, 195

Prestige goods, 90–91

Price controls, 261n17

Pricelessness, 3, 13, 15–18, 21, 33–34, 79, 95

Price-specie flow mechanism, 104, 174, 262n23

Primitive accumulation, 83

Private

goods, 38, 61, 130

market, 14, 32, 136

money, 209, 212

ownership, 4, 47, 118

property, 135

sector, 129

Private banks, 21, 27, 34–35, 55, 84, 116–119, 130, 134, 190, 209, 213, 259n23

currencies, 65, 92, 96–97, 105

as gatekeepers, 131–132

runs on, 86, 116–117

as satellite hoards, 126–127

Private hoards, 10, 67, 97, 119, 121–127

carbon, 165–166

“commoning,” 126

socialization of, 135

Privatization, 117, 132, 136, 230

of carbon, 194–195

of commons, 121–122, 183, 259n22

Profane, 1–4, 16–17

chits, 16, 62

economy, 2, 132, 134

objects, 3, 34

and sacred, 4, 21, 34, 67, 96

Profit, 3, 19–20, 29, 40, 121, 124, 131, 153, 171, 175, 259n23

motive, 182–183, 191

Public

hoards, 118, 118–120, 135

infrastructure, 239–240

money, 212

Public goods, 59–61, 224

vs. CPRs, 252n3, 253n5, 257n2

Pyrolysis, 19, 25, 75, 77, 141–145, 156–159, 187, 192, 250n6. See also Biochar

technology for, 144–147, 201

Quakerism, 184, 186

Quantification, 40, 178, 188, 229. See also Accounting

Quantitative easing, 230

Ranapiri, 245–247

Raworth, Kate, 28–29

Reforestation, 77. See also Afforestation

Regenerative

agriculture, 72, 170–171, 201, 264n16

economy, 28–29

Regen Network, 187

Regulation, 70, 180

banking, 6, 58–59, 69–70, 78, 89–90, 163, 173, 180, 209, 221

carbon banking, 172–173

Relics, 16, 30, 34, 53, 81, 95. See also Inalienable possessions

Religion, 19–20, 23, 30, 40, 154, 229

Indigenous, 19

organized, 2

Religious

language, 40

organizations, 29–30, 181

Repulsion, 216–217, 245–247. See also Gravity

Reserves

biochar as, 48, 50, 74–75, 142, 158–160, 164–168

centralized, 28, 93, 118, 128

as CPRs, 119–123

gold as (see Gold standard)

as hoards, 28, 32, 47, 93, 118–119, 127–128

national, 100, 106, 119–120, 127, 134

as sacred, 15–18, 28, 116

stability of, 78–79, 170, 217

Riksbank, 115–116

Risk, 36, 49, 60, 93, 171, 193, 216

Ritual, 30, 71, 184, 186, 250n8, 251n13, 253n6, 264n13

Rivalry, 120–121, 252n3

Robinson, Kim Stanley, 8, 32, 33

Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 105–106

Sacrality, 2, 17, 40, 61, 95, 134, 213

Sacred, 1–4, 16

carbon as, 51, 63, 70, 84, 156, 195, 238

Carbon Commons, 11, 15, 79

earth as, 186

gold as, 7, 95–96

goods, 16, 95, 110

hoards, 16–18, 28, 34, 113 (see also Inalienable possessions)

objects, 2–3, 30–31 (see also Relics)

and profane, 4, 21, 34, 67, 96

Sacrifice, 45–46, 68, 110, 184

Sanger, Larry, 182

Saussure, Ferdinand de, 56

Savings-bank revolution, 8, 10, 29, 135, 170, 172, 187

Scarcity, 134, 149, 174, 226–241, 266n1

absolute, 233

and abundance, 227, 241, 258n20, 259n3

artificial, 265n6

as fetish, 228

of gold, 174, 237

of money, 35–36, 228–230, 258n20

natural, 226–227

relative, 233, 238, 267n13

socially produced, 227, 230

Science, 4, 36, 55–56, 247

Seigniorage, 157, 260n10

Self-interest, 68, 100, 185

Sequestered carbon, 32, 164, 170–171

assaying, 48, 156, 187–189, 192, 201

demand for, 171, 238

gradation of, 236

representations of, 167–168, 175, 193

as reserves, 79, 148–149, 154, 156, 164–168, 217–218, 232 (see also Biochar, as reserves)

as sacred, 63, 238

value of, 155–156, 160, 168

verifying, 48, 69, 74, 140–141, 145, 163, 166–167, 180–181, 186–191, 193–195, 196, 202, 222, 236–237

Sequestration, 17. See also Carbon sequestration

gold, 2, 7, 22, 24, 47, 78, 233

Settler-colonialism. See Colonialism

Shadow banking, 6–7, 209

Silver, 17, 59, 89–90, 158, 211–212

hoards, 23

as inalienable possession, 86

standard, 98–99

Silviculture, 166

Sky-mining, 48, 79, 144, 156, 201. See also Drawdown

Slavery, 21, 53–55, 89, 156, 161, 243–244, 252n20

Smith, Adam, 93, 182, 228, 253n11

Social

capital, 135

infrastructure, 222, 224

labor, 15, 57, 63

reproduction, 18, 20, 87

Sociology, 61

Soil, 37, 45, 73–75, 138, 140–141, 143–144, 158, 187, 204

Sovereign exception, 105, 109, 112, 113, 133, 256n28

Soviet Union, 210

Spanish Empire, 89–91

Special Drawing Rights (SDRs), 175, 234, 256n31, 262n25

Speculation, 266n12

Sponge mechanism, 166, 235

Stablecoins, 216, 217, 220–221, 265n6

Standing, Guy, 131, 184

State, 4, 129, 217–218. See also Government

abandonment, 70

assets, 14

failure, 23

Sterilization, 91, 112–113, 164, 234, 256n34

carbon, 112–113, 167

gold, 104–105, 112–113

Sterling standard, 98–99. See also Silver

Stewards, 4, 59, 131, 136, 156, 184, 191, 258n16

Stewardship, 74, 148, 198

Indigenous, 4, 77, 124, 201

Stranded assets, 162

Sunday banks, 18

Surplus-value, 43–44

Sweating coins, 93–94

Sweden, 115–116

Swedenborg, Emanuel, 36, 151, 217, 227, 244

Swiss banking, 189

Tax, 58, 85, 87, 92, 174, 210, 235–236

“head,” 254n9

moral, 3

Temples, 264n13

and banks, 30–31, 181, 259n25

banks as, 18, 95–96

Fort Knox as, 20, 22, 106

Theft, 85, 177

of carbon, 154, 171, 177

cosmic, 171, 177–179

Tikkun, 45

Tithing, 3, 29, 68, 124, 260n13. See also Philanthropy

Token money, 87–88, 254n9

Tournament of value, 86, 116

Toxic assets, 7, 34–35, 134, 234–235

Tragedy of the commons, 59, 126, 252n1

Trash, 70–71, 254n4. See also Waste

American, 254n4

carbon as, 2, 24, 45, 62, 70

and treasure, 24, 35, 41–45, 66, 155

Treasure, 54, 85

buried, 14

carbon as, 2, 24, 156

and trash, 24, 35, 41–45, 66, 155

Treasure–trash continuum, 3, 42, 44, 252n23

Trees, 37–38, 216. See also Forests

Triangle trade, 53. See also Slavery

Trump, Donald J., 70

Trust, 30, 57–59, 69, 87, 104–106, 119–120, 211, 218–224

in banking, 48, 57, 102, 106, 116–117, 122, 126, 128–129, 212, 218–220

breakdown of, 26–27, 126, 222–224

in carbon banks, 27–28, 165–167, 180

systemic, 240

Truth, 8, 48, 182–183, 194, 195, 263n9

Tucker, Paul, 118

Tulipmania, 208

2008 financial crisis, 34–35, 62–63, 128, 134, 235

UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), 32

Unit of account currency, 175

US dollar, 108–109, 164, 171, 179, 210, 212, 234, 253n12, 260n14

Use-value, 42

US Federal Reserve, 7, 20–21, 34–35, 105, 128, 165, 174, 255n21, 258n19

creation of, 103

US Treasury, 7, 34–35, 105–107, 190

Usufruct rights, 123–125, 135

Utopia, 5–6

Vaults, 27, 40–41, 213, 215–216. See also Fort Knox

artificial, 22, 41, 44, 156

natural, 22, 41, 49–50, 79, 151–152, 156, 177

Verification, 180, 187–188, 194

community, 195

control of, 195

cryptocurrency, 48–49, 220–222

nonprofit, 180–181

of sequestered carbon, 48, 69, 74, 140–141, 145, 163, 166–167, 180–181, 186–188, 190–191, 193–195, 196, 202, 236–237

Verifiers, 48, 163, 166–167, 181, 237

as platform army, 181, 187

Vilar, Pierre, 88, 89

Violence, 82–83, 89, 99

Viral culture, 208

Voluntary markets, 31–32

Volunteers, 29, 48, 181

army, 191

labor of, 23, 182–183, 184, 186

War bonds, 161

Warehousing, 235, 267n9

Waste, 37–38, 39, 146

carbon, 25, 41, 44, 138–139, 148, 240

redeeming, 45

sacred, 156

value of, 43

and wealth, 42, 62

Water-diamond paradox, 228

Weber, Isabella, 35, 261n17

Weguelin, Thomas, 16, 17, 133

Weiner, Annette, 15–17, 42, 67, 85–86, 101, 133

White, Harry Dexter, 107

Wicked problem, 176

Wicksell, Knut, 14, 42, 53, 212–213

Wikipedia, 8, 19, 29, 48, 181–182, 189, 194, 263n5, 263n7

as commons, 183

as community, 184

history of, 182

as verifier, 181

Wildcat banks, 164

Work, 182, 247. See also Labor

communal, 187

World War I, 47, 96, 102

World War II, 107

Yap currency, 255n21, 261n18