Eco Currency

“We must not fail the billions who look to the international community to fulfill the promise of the Millennium Declaration for a better world. Let us meet in September to keep the promise.”

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon

A new agenda by Ban Ki-moon shows what steps to take to reach the Millennium goals by 2015. Estimated is that annual funding needed to achieve the Millennium Development Goals is of the order of $50 billion, a Tobin tax could fund this for a 0.05% tobin tax (based on currency transaction figures from 1995) would already revenue between $134 billion and $149 billion annually.

The Happy Planet Index (HPI) is an index to describe human well-being in combination with environmental impact. While normally  Gross Domestic Product or Human Development Index (which we used in our other post as a source) are used to describe development, Happy Planet Index also takes sustainability into account. Check out everything at happyplanetindex.org

A new way to view the world; ECO-mode, different areas tagged by amoebas

As nature is worth eco currency, there needs to be a system to assess the value of nature and to calculate how many eco’s nature is worth. A concept to truly and subjectively assess the value of nature is to use specially designed and grown amoebas.

photo by Alan Cleaver on Flickr

Even though it is yet unclear how the proposed system will get its money (Tobin tax has been proposed), a study by Mother Jones shows us we should carefully think about how we name it.

American participants in this experiment -with self acclaimed, varied political preferences- were proposed a program that would increase prices of carbon emitting activities. The extra costs would be directly used to pay for renewable energies or carbon capture and sequestration. All participants received the exact same proposal except for the name of the surcharge, half the people read about a “carbon tax”, the other half about “carbon offset”. They were finally asked to choose between purchasing two identical products, one only being costlier because it had this surcharge.