Hosted by CRCS, Dr. Delton Chen has unveiled a new web site — www.Global4C.org — explaining his proposal to use a new global complementary currency to reward carbon mitigation and sequestration. The proposal was recognized in last year’s MIT Climate Colab contest, and is explained in detail on the web site. Some notes on the project:
- The idea for the Global 4C Mitigation proposal was initiated by Dr. Delton Chen in June 2013 at Al Gore’s Climate Reality workshop in Istanbul, Turkey, and was conceived on the intuition that a new currency should be developed to globally finance greenhouse gas (GHG) mitigation. Dr. Chen devised the theoretical framework while traveling in Eastern Europe and Central America in 2013.
- The initial monetary policy was conceived through storytelling. A fictional metaphorical story, based on a pre-Columbian Mayan society, was first written through which the monetary policy was introduced to solve a hypothetical problem of severe deforestation. The monetary policy involves a complementary currency that can minimize political conflict and improve cooperation amongst tribal clans (we would like to share this story as a YouTube animation or short film). After the preliminary work was developed, Delton found that there were similar findings in a field of monetary study called “complementary currencies”. It was then possible to compare Global 4C (independently devised) with the other proposals that already existed in the public domain, but were not initially known when Global 4C was developed.
- In 2014 the proposal was recognized in Climate CoLab’s Land Use: Agriculture, Livestock and Forestry contest as a 2014 Judge’s Choice Winner and in December 2014, the project made the prestigious shortlist of finalists for the Climate Finance Innovation Award, managed by UNDP MDG Carbon and Mitsubishi UFJ Morgan Stanley Securities Co. Ltd.
Delton writes: “in effect we propose a systemic change to the global economy that can enable strong and lasting changes for the conservation of our atmosphere, ecosystems and natural resources. Evidence suggests that the existing (conventional) economic system is fundamentally flawed. Global 4C provides some inspiration because it tends to avoid conflict within the economic hierarchy, and it may be used to create a self-funding currency bull market during the 21st century.”
Read the essential elements of the proposal here.
