Art of Climbing Trees

United Earth Economy (UEE)

An equal access Capped Asset Resource-Based¹⁰¹ Flexible Renewable Energy Economy (CARB FREEconomy)¹⁰⁷, prioritising Jugaadi philosophy²⁸⁸, circular/reuse* and localism¹⁴⁴. 

The EAT allows us to see the safe carrying capacity of the planet and to understand the reality of ‘one planet living’. Using the scientifically deduced/empirical evidence and consensus, we can extrapolate the limits of activity or extraction/exploitation; to identify which activities need to come to an immediate halt (such as the production of certain pesticides), that we may call 1st Degree Grey Resources, which activities need to rapidly slow down, such as meat consumption (2nd Degree Grey Resources), or the activities that need to expand, such as generating truly clean energy. (What needs doing and undoing, in other words). A TEETS-like^206/207 points system and a hierarchy of Green solutions¹⁴⁴ could also help frame this task.

The Grey Resource Budget comprises the destructive activities and resources that are often very hard to stop using. These Grey Resources will be earmarked for a resource-decent strategy using TEQs and TRQs or something similar (below). 

A Green Resource Budget, which comprises the sum total of safely useable available resources and ecosystem services that will prioritise surface materials for recycling (often sourced from Grey Resource products), such as the metals found in combustion engines, freight vessels and weaponry¹⁹⁹, (that I will call ‘land mining’). We can mine land-fill sites rather than wilderness (which would serve to clean up our latent seeping mess, while recovering valuable resources). Of course, there’s a grey area between Grey Resources and Green Resources. Only tomatoes grown and sold locally with no fossil fuel or chemical input, or organic coffee transported by wind, for example, could be regarded as purely Green. 

We aim to create a resource-based economy that removes abstractions (i.e., interest, stocks, shares, etc.). Any money in the system is directly related to tangible resources in time – either finite or renewable – but always with a real calculable energy price tag – whether it be mineral, vegetable, human/animal kilojoules, or renewably generated power. (To first calculate the sum of resources in the world and then translate that into currency is a very challenging task!) Where possible, for large projects, for example, it would be judicious to discuss needs in terms of specific quantities of raw materials rather than discussing material needs in terms of financial value. To ease the average day-to-day transaction, we’ll primarily use ‘pre-translated resources’, i.e., currency.

The UE budget in five parts:
1. Personal Asset Cap (PAC) – Sustains the individual – food, fuel, clothing, entertainment, etc. The PAC comprises the UBI plus the Personal Income (PI) – a maximum sum of additional earned money. To calculate the PAC, the total available energy/resources globally are divided by the total number of humans minus the energy/resources needed for the other UE services: UBS, GloWS, and GRREE (below). See also ‘Getting to equality’ (below). 

Note: Those living outside of industrial society, such as isolated indigenous tribes who may choose not to participate in the UEE, will be counted, but we won’t use their allocation of resources. Similarly, if people drop out of the system by living gently in their own way, or if our population decreases, it won’t give the rest of us extra resources to work with. (A natural disaster wiping out thousands of people, for example, won’t increase the pot.) This is to prioritise degrowth and avoid greedy psychopaths engineering scenarios that decrease the population for personal gain.

2. Business Asset Cap (BAC) – Like people, businesses will have a profit ceiling. Earnings are automatically redirected to shared UE budgets when the PAC or BAC threshold is met. Call it taxation, or call it a shared prosperity levy. (See ‘Business, Corporations, UE Stewardship and Finance’ below.)

3. Universal Basic Services (UBS) – Sustains the individual’s wider needs, e.g., well-insulated housing stock, education and information (inc. the internet), transport, health care, legal – community services and public luxuries.

4. Globe Welfare Service (GloWS) – the broad brushstrokes of human and ecosystem needs: cleaning/rejuvenating/sustaining. I.e., carbon sequestration initiatives, cleaning up industrial waste, rejuvenation of degraded ecosystems, desalination water works, etc.

5. Green Resources/Renewable Energy Excess budget (GRREE) – is Direct Liquid Democracy²¹⁸ resource management for Play/experimentation. 

Anyone can present a project for a portion of the GRREE. This may be to fund your performance, Dancing on Rainbows of Burning Nanocrystalline Cellulose⁷¹, set up a microbial brewery²⁹⁸, or build a (wooden) spaceship. The scheme enables democratic allocation of the shared resources while avoiding corruptible middle(wo)men such as bankers or state-sanctioned gatekeepers⁷¹. All projects will need to pass a TEETS test^206/207 or similar. 

Every Earth citizen gets an equal quantity of GRREE budget credits to vote with on any GRREE proposal. You might need 100 people to offer their credits for your Dancing on Cellulose performance, 5000 people for your microbial brewery²⁹⁸, and several million people to build your spaceship. Depending on their scope, projects may also require local, regional, or global political input.

Underdeveloped countries/peoples, homeless people and those seeking refuge (refugees), people experiencing poverty in general everywhere, and places requiring basic needs such as clean water systems and climate mitigation infrastructure would initially receive the lion’s share of the GloWS budget. In contrast, overdeveloped countries/regions of countries will need to get used to living within smaller means and slower development. 

Additionally, to ensure a fair, incentivised (rather than a totalitarian or top-down) energy decent plan that helps get us to a FREEconomy¹⁰⁷ as soon as possible, we can use David’s¹⁷² Tradeable Energy Quotas (TEQs):

Peak oil and the urgent need to slow that Niagara Falls¹⁵⁹ flow of oil will provoke energy scarcity and steeply rising energy prices, which will cause energy riots and high mortality. A tonne of carbon dioxide (in 2021) was supposed to cost £6.50; the IPCC has proposed this figure should be set at about £4000 per tonne by 2030 = a likelihood of starvation and rioting. 

Implementing TEQs is the fairest possible way to ensure everyone, regardless of their financial security, gets the energy they need to live, crucially, without micromanagement. The TEQs system gives every citizen an equal ration (or entitlement) of a nation’s – or ideally the planet’s Grey energy budget, and this total budget (and therefore each individual’s quota) would then periodically be reduced to meet our emissions target (of zero). If you used less than your entitlement, you could sell the excess on the ‘TEQs market’. If you needed more, you could buy more, which others are selling, until the period’s total quota is used up**. 

Governments (or local to global UE entities) and businesses bid for the TEQs they need on the TEQs market/auction, so the goods and services you buy would include the prepaid TEQs, i.e., the embedded energy cost. 

The TEQs system creates a scenario that makes a transition to a zero-emission society in everyone’s interest by promoting inventiveness, co-operation and fairness while still maintaining individual freedoms in how they spend their ration. It also helps to deflate our expectations and sense of entitlement to energy and luxuries over time, which is perhaps the most challenging hurdle; we ween ourselves off our addiction to fossil fuels safely. 

Countries/regions of countries can be rated in terms of over or under-development, and the amount of TEQs available to citizens of each location will be reflected accordingly. Over-developed nations, such as Norway, would likely receive fewer TEQs than the Democratic Republic of Congo (while, for example, considering the need for extra household heating in Norway.) Entitlement negotiations such as these between nations should aim to balance fair needs while avoiding penalising or rewarding countries for the energy infrastructure they begin with. For example, with mountains and plenty of rainfall, Norway has already invested heavily in hydropower, so Norwegians would immediately be ahead of the game with excess TEQs to spend or sell (to the Congolese, for example). However, Norway’s economy and, therefore, renewable energy infrastructure have benefitted from causing the climate crisis in the first place (via oil revenues), as well as unequal currency values and trade rules favouring Western nations. All these factors make for a complicated mess of negotiations, so the primary factor of TEQs distribution should be basic needs. Secondly, it should take account of history and equity. The sum of renewable energy produced globally could then be viewed as a single pool to share. (One may then create two ways to measure TEQs: a total global sum and the local sum).

TEQs, designed by David¹⁷² – a self-described right-winger – will abate the need for micromanagement, and low-emission initiatives will naturally spring up out of necessity, such as tool share schemes (i.e., spreading the TEQs needed to buy tools across a community to create a shared workshop containing thousands of tools, will be cheaper than doing it on your own, and you’d get a superior workshop where you can also trade information and skills or produce with neighbours). Other examples might include local food production²⁹⁸, carpools, repair salons and repair businesses, recycling/reuse depots (that organise unwanted resources like an industrial-scale charity shop for anything), and where waste is broken down into component parts for local manufacturing/building/making, etc∴. 

To reduce our use of specific Grey Resources fairly, we might create another category that works similarly to TEQs, which I’ll call Tradeable Resource Quotas (TRQs, pronounced treks). TRQs would help us reduce our pressure on the oceans, for example, fairly, by allocating equal rations of fish or seafood to each citizen (that can be traded on the TRQs market), providing a timeline for obtaining alternative sources of protein and managing/de-escalating expectations. 

Local municipalities will also be subject to a TEQs and TRQs system that focuses on use and end-of-use in general, including the enormous energy spent on fresh water and sewage services. Everything from brown water, grey water, food composting, and humanure³⁷ will be discussed to reduce our corporate use of dirty energy and build localised resilience. 

Please try using the (efficient) ‘Six Thinking Hats’ method of parallel thinking for sharing your ideas.
It helps us to organise our thoughts and feelings. Wear the Black Hat for critisism/doubts; the Green hat for creative suggestions; the Yellow for positive responses, Red for gut feelings; White for information. I am wearing the Blue Hat now, when I say we are here to design Eutopia.

Simply write ‘Black’, ‘Yellow’, ‘Green’, etc, before your given response. Then, start a new paragraph for ideas of a different coloured hat.