George Orwell Would Not Approve The previous post explored the ruinous environmental effects of the cryptocurrency called bitcoin. The pollution caused by digital bitcoin "mining" -- greenhouse gas emissions, as well as conventional, fatal dispersal of toxic elements and smog -- is called in the economics biz an "externality" or "external diseconomy." Top-level euphemisms, both, right up there with "collateral damage," "enhanced interrogation techniques" and "billiard academy." Mr. George Orwell would not approve. Some "progressive" economists, however, "get real" by using the term "negative externality."
Enough with the quotes, Still, it's a crazy world in which I'd be arrested for dumping a barrel of garbage on my neighbor's lawn, but if I send a million barrels of trash up a smokestack and injure countless people bit-by-bit, over time, that's okay. One reason such blatantly anti-social behaviors are accepted is the sterile, soulless language of economics. Anything outside the producer-consumer transaction is by definition external -- tangential, lacking in importance. And therefore not incorporated into economic statistics trumpeted by the economics "profession" (sorry) and its lackeys in the mass media. Two classic, moldy examples are Gross Domestic Product and Average Income, common barometers that are, respectively, heedless of the destruction wrought by fossil-fuel powered economic growth and the cruel facts of income inequality.
As an economist might have drawled in the movie Cool Hand Luke, what we have here is a failure to internalize negative externalities. Or just be human. Take responsibility.
Enough with the quotes, Still, it's a crazy world in which I'd be arrested for dumping a barrel of garbage on my neighbor's lawn, but if I send a million barrels of trash up a smokestack and injure countless people bit-by-bit, over time, that's okay. One reason such blatantly anti-social behaviors are accepted is the sterile, soulless language of economics. Anything outside the producer-consumer transaction is by definition external -- tangential, lacking in importance. And therefore not incorporated into economic statistics trumpeted by the economics "profession" (sorry) and its lackeys in the mass media. Two classic, moldy examples are Gross Domestic Product and Average Income, common barometers that are, respectively, heedless of the destruction wrought by fossil-fuel powered economic growth and the cruel facts of income inequality.
As an economist might have drawled in the movie Cool Hand Luke, what we have here is a failure to internalize negative externalities. Or just be human. Take responsibility.
Library Book, in Domestic Context Back to bitcoin. Its production relies on the "proof of work" concept, in which an action has to be physically performed in order to create the currency. With bitcoin, that activity is wasting electricity and accelerating climate change. So I wondered, why can't we have a greencoin? Why can't its "proof of work" come in the form of sustainable or eco-healing behaviors such as reforestation or renewable energy development? So I Googled; yes, greencoin exists. Then I happened to be reading Kim Stanley Robinson's wonderful new novel Red Moon, which mentions something called carboncoin. Turns out, in the year 2047, a couple hundred million Americans transfer their saving from the big banks into carboncoin, a cryptocurrency that is mined by taking carbon out of the air. Did Robinson make this up? So I Googled again; carboncoin exists, too. Warning: the linked article in the previous sentence, written by a person/consortium named AxisMundi, reads like a cross between a boring economics text and the Unibomber's manifesto.
White-breasted Nuthatch = .00001252 birdcoin Now I wonder once more, why not birdcoin? (I have not Googled it, therefore it may not exist.) Instead of miners, this cryptocurrency would have birders. Birdcoin birders would enact "proof of work" by going for walks and spotting birds, then watching them. Enjoying them. Being moved by them. And that's a good thing because, in the words of novelist Margaret Atwood, who knows a few things about dystopia and its possibilities, "If you follow birds, it allows you to get a pretty global view of what's happening to the planet." (See Audubon magazine, Winter 2019.) Birdcoin, let's wing it!
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