Gustav Peebles: Not Just Banking, Carbon Banking

Have you ever thought about how random it seems that gold is worth, well, its weight in gold? This week’s guest on Sea Change Radio, Gustav Peebles, is an anthropologist and monetary policy expert at Stockholm University. He has not only wondered about the way human beings assign value to a particular element on the periodic table, he has pondered what it would look like if we we applied precious valuation to an element that really matters for our own survival, like atmospheric carbon. In his new book, co-written with Benjamin Luzzatto, “The First and Last Bank: Climate Change, Currency, and a New Carbon Commons,” Peebles lays out a novel, scalable way not to just dole out carbon credits, but to actually monetize the conservation of carbon waste. We discuss the fundamentals of a possible carbon banking system, and talk through just how such a concept might roll out.