The personal climate account

Nobody would seriously question the fact that you can't buy anything anymore when the money in your account is gone. Or that it makes more sense to travel less often but still have money left over to buy groceries and heat your home in winter. Because when the money is almost spent, it is otherwise not enough for the most necessary things. Sounds logical, it is. For this reason, we use prices to find out what we can afford and for what consumption our money is still sufficient. As with money, so it is with our climate gas "consumption". Realistically speaking, this is just as finite as our money on the bank account. Unfortunately, at the moment this budget is not directly linked to our consumption and environmental behavior. Because the price of something in euros, dollars, yen... does not reflect or is not able to reflect the price to the environment.

 

Climate gas consumption must be quantified, personalized and limited. Since every citizen of the world has an equal right to use the resource "atmosphere," everyone is allocated this emission quota, in the form of the parallel currency ECO, for individual use. In order to record and account for this consumption, a personal climate account is required. This is loaded by the climate bank, analogously to a normal salary current account, monthly in the form of an amount co-ordinated for everyone. The aim is to record the emissions of personal consumption, to settle them centrally by means of the parallel currency ECO and thus to limit them fairly and very effectively. Only natural persons receive a climate account. 

 


Such a personalized emission trading scheme is enormously efficient and unrivalled in its fairness in relation to other concepts under discussion for saving our climate. It allows a maximum of personal freedom of choice, but within clearly defined limits for all. For example, anyone who does not want to give up the idea of continuing to make three long-distance journeys a year can of course do so, but has to limit themselves elsewhere. Just as with money. If someone overdraws their climate account, the card in the supermarket at the checkout, for example, would refuse to be debited again or would refuse to make a purchase, similar to a cash account. The consumer has to get a climate quota at the market or simply postpone the purchase until later. A certain disposition framework, similar to a current account, is also conceivable. For larger purchases, such as a house or a car, for which a citizen's annual climate budget is insufficient, it is conceivable, similar to the capital market, to take out a climate loan from the climate bank and pay off this "loan" over a longer period of time or to buy the required quota on the free climate market. The market automatically regulates the price for traded individual emissions. In order to create a suitable trading platform, it makes sense to introduce a supranational climate gas emission exchange in order to trade climate quotas that are not needed or that are additionally required.

In contrast to the unrestrained money market, the total amount of ECO within the current accounting period is fixed and cannot be increased by inflation. An increase, as happens everywhere with the variable money supply of a country or our monetary union, is therefore ruled out during a validation period.

The complementary currency ECO is not subject to the interest effect. The ratio ECO to emission quota always remains hard-coupled. ECO trading is only possible when unused ECO are offered for sale. Purchase and acquisition remain a zero-sum game within a closed-loop system.


ECOs which are currently not fully used, can either be hoarded for later use or traded. However, trading with ECO, i.e. purchasing additional ECO or selling them, remains a zero-sum game. Under no circumstances the ECOs issued by the climate bank may be more than generated. In this way, a healthy circulation system is created that is self-contained. Any additional ECOs purchased must come from the closed system, from someone's climate account. The total amount of ECOs that have been transferred to the climate bank through consumption are repaid from the overall system, as they are consumed and thus compensated by the corresponding equivalent amount of greenhouse gas emission. A coherent system that functions in a stable and transparent manner with the appropriate fine tuning and effective control mechanisms.

 

The designated climate gas quota associated with the purchase of an item or service is charged to the personal climate account during the normal payment process, simultaneously with the debiting of the current account. The industry is only an emission-diverter, towards the end consumer.

 

It could be critically noted that some people prefer to pay EURO amounts in cash, at least some of the time. Some people may not even have an EC card. These people can of course continue to do so. If required, they will be issued with a separate climate bank check card so that the ECO amount can also be debited digitally when making a (euro) cash purchase.

This page was translated with the help of DeepL