The unprecedented audacity of ‘kind’ money
Moolah’s unironic redemption as the doula of climate security
The scariest climate crisis rhetoric comes from the prevailing, default assumption that implementing a solution at scale is beyond our financial reach.
In other words:
Money — a human social construct to which we bestow imaginary value and, around which, we organize our modern lives and deaths — is (a) physically unlimited as a tool to despoil the environment, but (b) not conceptualized big enough to be a tool to repair the environment.
It’s reasonable, and terrifyingly popular, to believe that this tragic mismatch is frozen in amber: As in, we are already defeated by a myth that money is not robust enough to even try to slay the climate dragon. It's accepted that money is callous and lethal.
Ambitious in the extreme
Even by friendlies, Bank of Nature’s climate finance and fiduciary economy proposal — which identifies and engages billions and trillions of existing but misplaced money in the global economy that works at the scale of nature — is characterized as “ambitious in the extreme”. It’s not the merits of the idea that shut down conversation, but the utterance of the t-word.
“Agreed! We must think big about climate,” says the hand-wringing sentiment about climate inaction, “but no-no-no we can’t think That Big. Trillions!? It’s too risky. It’s just too darned expensive.”
This jaundiced “that’s how the real world works” critique is well-meant, but so-very small and not at all consistent with our history of rallying human achievement over other adversities. “Besides, we have COP pledges and net zero goals and ESG, which should be enough” when we know otherwise. It’s as if this time, in a shadow of existential threats, unprecedented audacity to try something never tried before is unwarranted or risible.
No one doubts our ability to execute a climate plan should money suddenly get out of the way — which, alone, is worth thinking about. Humanity has the requisite jobs, ingenuity and expertise, the technologies, the clear-eyed scope of the problem and the current science to deal substantively and decisively with the climate crisis as a new forward-looking, future-proofing, trillion-dollar industry.
Nope. It’s all there, says the status quo, except for the money to pay for it.
Human society may not ultimately act on climate for a variety of reasons, but lack of available cash is not one of them. That’s just not how money works on the biggest of stages. Bank of Nature’s humble, contrarian view is that, while money’s climate trajectory seems alarmingly fixed, it is more accurate and hopeful to assess the role of money in society as the slumping window glass in 18th Century farmhouses — constantly moving over centuries, rather than lifetimes or the next quarter.
In actuality, there is so much existing, purposeful money to spend on climate that the hard part will be deciding which good idea, stuck on a white board of possibility, gets to go first.
I’m calling it “kind money”. It’s real and, no, it’s not an unkind joke.
Nouveaux riches
Kind money is a latent type of money with unique rules born of fintech innovation in the early 1980s. So, appropriately, it’s a tech savvy, problem-solving, passionate Millennial and already a force at planet scale.
Kind money, also known at Bank of Nature as fiduciary money, is $30 trillion to $50 trillion of retirement savings and represents half of the entire global broad money supply. It exists without new taxation — and without the specter of some version of quantitative “climate easing” that balloons the economy with dollar signs. It just needs to be set free to operate without the constraints of arbitrary nation state borders and cultures. Kind money works anywhere it can find financing deals that fit its narrow criteria: Actuarial ROI without damage to the future.
Kind money is hiding in plain sight. In the news, kind money rankles conservatives tripping over fiduciary duty statutes and the priorities of trillion-dollar public pensions. It scares oil companies into suing the future. Kind money’s baby steps have started to unravel the status quo’s willful climate impasse, whether you can see it yet or not, and will walk faster with some of your attention.
Kind money is intergenerational and tailor-made to do more climate-affirming work quicker than present “cruel money”, with which we are likely more familiar. Kind money can, if blinkers are removed, embolden civil society to consider how money can be used to amplify social goods — instead of being a weapon of mass destruction.
Kind money can defend itself legally as kind. The future of kind money is already written in law and grounded in the elegant human qualities of compassion, loyalty and fairness — ideals most of us miss in our society now. Granted, because of key historical missteps, those laws are in blatant breach of their intent and Bank of Nature is working to correct that. Maybe you can help.
Kind money is the safer alternative path to a world made sustainable.
Admittedly, it all sounds painfully naïve when humanity, as presently expressed through $s, €s, ¥s, and £s, is inexcusably heartless, disloyal and unfair. Through experience, we know money to be unkind.
The fathoms-deep ebb
That’s fixable. Whatever money has become, it didn’t start out craven nor is craven the final destination.
We happen to be living in a particularly dark, protracted, fathoms-deep ebb in money’s continuum that started with colonial wealth-creation adventures 600 years ago. It’s an inherited state of affairs made ever-more bleak by 20th Century neoliberalism’s doubling down on the worst parts of wealth extraction by trapping us in a monopoly of abstracted, buy low-sell high capital markets, to the exclusion of other ways to make money.
The circumstances, absent “kind money” at scale, are dire. Current money practice is a shameful and anti-human means of social control called “economy” made volatile by the voodoo of “economics” and the clubby, self-serving scheming of “finance”. Kind money, already afoot, makes the situation temporary.
Plus, we still have at least one big, untried, anti-establishment “kind money” play that:
Repairs the broken, caustic money status quo from the inside-out, using the rules of the oppressors against the oppressors, to paraphrase MLK, Jr.
Subverts the hoarded-money-as-power model that decides the climate outcomes for the rest of us, regardless of our majority concerns.
Doesn’t require a spontaneous global convergence of human goodwill nor the voluntary, collective rejection of traditional growth priorities — though, wouldn't that be nice?
Bridges the cognitive dissonance when Bank of Nature talks up moolah, the de facto root of all evil, as the doula of climate heroism.
Revisit fiduciary law. Compel fiduciary reviews. Create "safer alternative paths" for kind money to pay for climate security, as kind money is designed to do.
A matter of belief
Dialetheism is the perspective that two opposing ideas can be true simultaneously.
Money is imaginary.
Money is real.
One declaration is true, while its negation is also true.
While dialetheism-purists will squint, it’s how I’ve come to understand why money is both material and immaterial in how we make all choices.
For the Average Joe just getting by, money is materially life-and-death. There is no Mac 'n Cheese without first finding the US$1.25 to buy the box. (The World Bank says 7% of the global population, can buy one box and have 90 cents extra to pay the rest of the day’s expenses like pots, plates and fire for boiling pasta.)
Grandma’s surgery only happens if we can pony up the cash to pay the doctors, rent the operating room, get her the necessary MRIs and medicines. Even a respectful burial, in lieu of treatment, will load up the credit card. If you want to defend your safety, you don’t throw money. You use your karate skills bought at the dojo.
Individuals triage both routine and traumatizing decisions every day based not on dollar amount, but whether the purchase is worth the sacrifice to other budgeted priorities. We are, after all, eight billion specialists — people unlikely to possess all the skills and resources required to survive without society’s backstops. Society sells us our missing basics for cash. Less money means fewer basics and fewer choices. In fact, we take a torch to Maslow by acknowledging that there is a basement called “money” in the pyramid of needs. Almost 40% of Earthlings live at a level at which purchasing “safety” — the next level up from physical needs like food — is a luxury.
These money woes are vivid and incongruous when society’s most ambitious mobilizations like moon landings, war footings and COVID vaccines always seem to have bags of money at the ready. Someone just starts writing checks. Money, deployed at the largest scale, is immaterial. It’s just there — regardless the ,000,000,000,000s.
Ransoms
It may be impolitic for governments to negotiate with terrorists, but at a personal level, we know that if money makes the problem go away, pay the ransom. Removing the danger costs what it costs. Pay it in dollars or by trading things more precious. Or, don’t pay the ransom. At that point, it’s not about money. It’s about whether the payment is worth it, a decision that involves different criteria than checking the bank balance.
In this case, my-version dialetheism allows us to carry on loathing money for its insidious scourges of greed and economic growth, dark money politics and corporatized government, undemocratic allocations and anti-climate priorities. At the same time, we can see its big-time, white knight, climate-era redemption arc. Both can be true simultaneously — because, that's the situation whether it makes sense or not.
It's not reasonable to consider any strategy related to climate without the use of more money than we have ever marshaled before: Eye-popping, heretofore unthinkably huge wheelbarrows of cash. And, if we resolve the colonial aspects of the climate crisis with “kind money” that works at the scale of the crisis, we start to unwind the downstream social ills that make unkind money so personal. If we fix climate for the retirees legally owed a dignified future by kind money, we fix climate for everyone.
Money at scale can be anything we need it to be
By its human design, money requires our agreement of its value and its purpose, but it’s not divine or untouchable. We invented money to facilitate our freedom to choose, an ideal long gone when the reality of money today is the elimination of choice. Still, it’s illogical for us to believe money will lead to our macro environmental undoing because it’s our foe even if that’s our experience at the personal level.
There are historical inflection points that pointed us to this money predicament, not all of them engineered by malevolent bad actors who didn’t account for the unforeseen consequences. More to blame is our society’s blindness to our evolving and expanding needs that have exceeded the abilities of the mechanisms we created to manage us.
At Bank of Nature, for example, we say there is a place for government in the climate remedy — but only as a supporting player focused on the jobs it can actually, reasonably, effectively do. That’s protecting fiduciary policy. Climate is not one of those jobs when it conflicts with the economy, government’s first loyalty.
Remember, too, 37% of the planet’s nation states have “opaque” nationalized oil companies (NOCs), not including the US and Canada, with private oil, that nonetheless rank them in the top five oil countries. That conflict of interest doesn’t factor the government policy coziness with non-oil industries like forestry or big agriculture that also impact our climate outcomes.
Bad finance is the world we live in
Part of money’s push me-pull you tension is that it is embedded in everything. Putting money on trial requires a budget. Unless you have the correct change in your wallet, accumulating the money for a courtroom budget requires finance. If you’re political, how that budget impacts the economy is a talking point. Strip away all the nuance of money and you're left with three separate, yet conflated, cousins in the money family:
Actual money, which is the mindless shovel. A tool.
Money facilitates transactions. It does not decide whether we have a viable future habitat. That said, Adam Smith theory says that money sent in one particular direction draws a sociological line in the sand — but his views predate the warping interference of vast institutional investors like pension funds acting villainously instead of kindly over the past 50 years. More money has more power to decide the lines.
Because of its trillion-dollar scale, fiduciary “kind money” can feed more finance than any other type of money. Presently, kind money is being used for unkind purposes, which is a contravention of money law and, as outcomes, accumulates a climate crisis and incites divisive hate.
Finance, which is the mindful process of deciding where and how deep to dig the grave with the shovel. It’s a choice about how the tool is used for a benefit — and finance is the obvious problem cousin that has run amok.
Finance is not actual money; it’s the cleverness used to multiply actual money.
There is nothing inherently wrong in using money to make more money. Even a fiduciary economy (see below) needs to grow sufficiently through finance to meet the expanding needs of 10.4 billion people by 2080. Finance is what helps you buy a house, a car and an exotic post-COVID vacation. Finance is how your employer is able to pay your salary. Finance is how we pay for social services and national defense. Finance is what innovated your devices-of-choice. Also, it’s what makes credit card companies and banks rich — lending you money for a fee that allows you to make expensive choices now. Junks bonds, private equity, insurance and subprime mortgages are finance.
Securitization is just one kind of finance. Oil and gas “divestment” is a form of securitization. Presently, securitization monopolizes financial choice — to the exclusion of other "kinder finance" ways to make money.
Economy, which is the automated counting of cemeteries, grave diggers, coffin sales and causes of death by shovel distilled into a metric like GDP. Technically, it's an apolitical comprehensive “report card” of the processes for engaging the shovel for a benefit. However, economy is used for political advantage, so who knows whether an A- isn’t really a D?
Economy is the agglomeration of finance and the flow of money. Bad finance (see above) makes the economy we live in today. Good finance, using the right tools of money as they are designed, can shift enough money toward climate to make all the positive economic difference in the (future) world.
A neoliberal economy, the current state of global financing operations, has been the predominant economic “theory” since about 1970. Its primary focus is the speculative securities markets like Wall Street as the way for society to innovate solutions, rather than government intervention. In reality, government and markets have essentially split the neoliberal world, with a few crumbs for civil society and no recognition for the social pillar called finance, kind or otherwise.
If government and markets don’t want a climate fix, there is not going to be a climate fix, regardless of the climate lip service. They don’t want a climate fix. Fiduciaries are in charge of the money that can, by design, create a climate fix.
A kind/fiduciary economy — or, a post-neoliberal economy — acknowledges the vast economic scale of defined-benefit plans specifically, but the retirement savings sector generally, to define our economy and our future. Aligning fiduciary practice with the fiduciary deployment of billions and trillions shifts money toward fiduciary-led initiatives that meet quantitative and qualitative minimums.
Money no object
There is a rare, peacocking human for whom “money is no object.” They have so much money that the triage to purchase of this or that is not required. Whim takes the lead, and stuff just gets done — usually with the most glamorous contractors.
“Just put it on the Black Card,” a special Amex for those who live “Life without Limits®”.
The rest of us, of course, put a lot of meaning into the value of money to do what we need it to do. Your purview to decide how money works for your benefit ends with the limits of your piggy bank. There will always be bigger piggy banks choosing for you, so the point here is to challenge how those funds operate in compliance or noncompliance with their own legal, human design.
They fail that kind of review and that’s an opportunity to replace unkind money with something kindlier.
There are global challenges, maybe climate, where the scale of the threat is so ludicrously huge that money is irrelevant. It’s some threshold at which point there is so much money in play that political interference about priorities no longer applies. Money is no object. Stuff gets done regardless of partisanship. We do what we need to do in order to neutralize the threat, rather than dither about how we pay for it.
I’m not sure what that number is, especially as it relates to climate, but it’s going to be bigger than your guess. The closest we have are the tens of trillions that should, by their own kindly rules, benefit those owed a dignified future regardless of borders and cultures and, while they are at it, just get the “darned expensive” job done for the rest of us.
Let’s make friends with kind money, maybe bring it a welcoming casserole.