GREEN FINANCE

I've added a couple of links to the Biding and Nature Politics section (viewable in the web version) of this blog.  I've added CarbonCredits.com and the Green Finance Institute (here) in addition to the links to Inkcap, Stock brokers, Nature Political Commentators and Green Politics Satire. Dieter Helm and the Green Finance Institute also have excellent podcasts on Spotify. 

Any regular reader of this blog will know how excited I am about the nature finance revolution. 30 years ago I was studying Environmental Science at University (Plymouth and Exeter) where multi-metric economies were first envisioned and  it has taken that long for these ideas to actually appear into real life (apart from tiny test tube rebel cells like our own Little Oak Group). I'm not sure it has dawned on everyone yet that this actually heralds the beginning of the end of Fundamental Capitalism as limits to growth are reached (expressed in the declaration of the climate and ecological emergency) and the costs associated with the externalities of Capitalism (including climate and ecological breakdown) are beginning to be subsumed into economic considerations, manifested in the adoption of the Polluter Pay principles and Public Money for Public Goods which have been transposed into initiatives and new legislation such as the Environment and Agricultural Acts through various vehicles such as the Net Biodiversity Gain Framework, Net Zero, the Sustainable Farming Initiative, ELMs and Carbon Credits. The government advisory body, the Natural Capital Committee headed up by Dieter Helm (an Oxford University lecturer aka the father of natural capital) were largely responsible for these changes and that committee has now been merged into the Office of Environmental Protection (OEP). It's a new system- basically at test stage.     

The next stage of this revolution is the most exciting for naturalists. Much of the system change so far has been about Carbon but there is still a long way to go before we have something similar to a tradeable biodiversity credit (although Net Gain has started this ball rolling) in the way we now have expanding tradeable Carbon credits and carbon markets. In a way the Climate Crisis is being addressed (by introducing carbon metrics) but the Ecological part of the Climate and Ecological Emergency is still largely un-resolved. All our bird and moth recording and all other citizen science will be going into developing a meaningful biodiversity credit which will be scaled up using e-DNA methods (e.g. where one water sample can tell you all the species in the water body as all animals leave traces of their DNA) and extrapolative modelling. There really does appear to be some light at the end of the tunnel now for biodiversity loss as a biodiversity metric/credit is the beginning of a biodiversity price which will eventually be reflected in the cost of goods basically pushing all consumers to buy regenerative goods and to drive unsustainable and value extraction corporations to extinction. Our system is currently unsustainable which literally means it cannot be sustained- it will (it already clearly is!) absolutely and certainly collapse (probably slowly but surely) but fortunately we now have a safety net developing and a new direction roughly worked out. The financial opportunities in all this are immense- the most powerful people in the future will be those who embrace this as early as possible.

It's interesting for me to see my first one of these Foresight Annual Report. I generally scour through Corporate Annual Reports to pick out their green washing and lies but this is the first one I've ever seen (maybe I'm a bit behind on all this) that is a Natural Capital Company listed on the stock market. As 95% of capitalist start ups fail within the first two years it will be interesting to see what the survival rate of this new age of Stock market listed companies will be. Certainly interesting times with immense new opportunities. How the unsustainable collapse and the sustainable rebuild inter-relate will be extremely interesting. 

Interestingly a reader of this blog messaged me recently commenting that I had come a long way from my Extinction Rebellion point of view (I was a co-founder of a local cell in 2019 and was a direct action activist). However as I pointed out, from my perspective that campaign fulfilled it's objectives- locally we got a Climate and Ecological Emergency declared in Sutton and globally the Climate and Ecological Emergency moved to the top of the political agenda and mainly since COP26 the Green Finance Revolution has started. The campaign worked and has started systemic change. I know it is not as fast and deep as some hoped but it certainly worked and got the ball rolling.  I agree the fact that it is not as fast and deep as it should be means that the collapse part of the collapse and rebuild of society will be much greater than theoretically needed (although the human condition has its natural limits which does not heed theory or rationality- basically we have to learn and change the hard way)  There's no point in continuing with disruptive direct activism when you've got what you wanted out of it. We were using the campaign locally to elevate Beddington Farmlands to the top of the local political agenda and that worked perfectly for us. I also got myself exiled from the local community which is a perfect position to be in for the final stage of the Beddington Farmlands campaign- an exiled rebel coming out of exile to help win the final battle is perfect for this story. A win that will almost certainly involve the new nature conservation system that has appeared since my exile- hopefully we will see an at scale test of this new system and what happens when it faces a disaster capitalist multi-billion dollar asset management company. Should be fun!  

So I have not in the slightest come a long way from my XR point of view, XR was part of this journey which we are building success on success. XR as an organisation itself (XR was actually a campaign of a larger well funded organisation called Rising UP) have also pledged to end public disruption for 2023. XR always said it was the alarm. The alarms have sounded and stopped- the bombs of Fundamental Capitalist Economic Collapse are now falling and the Sustainable Armies are aligning.