A healthy Earth can cope with 2 tonnes of carbon from each of us, per year. But we need a revolution in consumption to get there. Vinay Gupta shows how

Henri Campea

Really clear (though still developing) presentation from blockchain guru and disaster expert Vinay Gupta on:

1. the precise challenges of reducing the carbon output of our current economic system to a level the planet can cope with

2. the centrality of changing our cultures and behaviours of consumption

3. and how blockchain (or some similar form of software that tightly measures the use of objects) could effect that change

We recommend you take the long journey - over 100 slides - but we’ll post some provocative highlights:

Our (very tight) carbon budget

In short, the planet will be choked to death if the ideal path out of poverty is the shift to a ten-tonnes-of-carbon per person/per year urban lifestyle. Are there other paths?

Gupta identifies two paths - Bright Green Urbanism and Lean Green/Soft Development.

But Bright Green Urbanism has a problem - it won’t produce enough carbon savings, because it is premised on a rise of the resource-hungry urban middle-class.

Gupta thinks such savings are implausible. He then explores the “Lean Green/Soft Development” path. This is a viable path that the billions of the world’s poor might follow, instead of toxic middle-class urbanism.

The deep challenge is that places like Kerala and Cuba may have high quality lifestyle outcomes, but there is little per-capita wealth, as conventionally measured. And these are strongly agrarian economies:

For the rich world, this could converge with their cultural aspirations for a “Bright Green” path. The difference is, this would rebalance rural living alongside urban - or as Vinay puts it below, eco-favelas and downshifted suburbs.

Yet none of these targets are clear, or maybe even attractive enough, for those of us in the “urban rich” to seriously address our destructive carbon outputs. We may need some tech and digital system innovations to get us there, from where we are. Gupta shows the problem in two dramatic slides.

The first actually praises what he calls “optimised production” - we have figured out how to produce objects with huge levels of resource efficiency, actual or potential:

But we have not created a comparably powerful “science of consumption”:

Gupta believes that blockchain - or some form of monitoring computation - can make out acts of consumption as measurable as our acts of production:

Vinay is on the shill for Mattereum, his digital service, as the software which will gives “every object a domain name” (like every website or networked item has). We would immediately suggest that this should be more like a common infrastructure/protocal than his private service taking a cut (though we’ve long charted Vinay’s journey into capitalism in order to serve his liberatory ends).

But this pecuniary ambition doesn’t diminish Gupta’s concrete imagining of an economy and lifestyle that really gets to grip with "circular economies”, new ways of using and consuming stuff - but ways that are fully aware of the climate disaster involved in unnecessary carbon pollution.

A few slides below flesh this out. First, a brilliant insight into the way stories about our things gives them value:

Gupta wants blockchain (an improved, less computationally costly version) to create an “asset passport” for every produced object, which he thinks will drive incentives towards “destroying planned obsolescence”. This is because the passport will help highlight when some object just keeps breaking down, because it can’t be sold on again, in an e-Bay like way:

Vinay’s final two slides push for Mattereum as the solution. But we’d suggest you read the text as a visualisation of a new kind of “weighted consumerism” - one where we have a smaller range of more durable “stuff” in our lives, much more tied to use and relevance, but with a money system enabling transactions in it. (Previously in the presentation, Gupta has made the very pragmatic case that this system might be pioneered by its ability to digital track the provenance of high-quality goods (art, wine, etc) - and that a carbon/ecological indicator could also easily be placed there).

Finally, in his sketchier notes towards the end, Gupta cites the Demos Helsinki Sustainable Lifestyle Scenarios 2050 - which we have often cited here - as very tangible imaginings of the different societal outcomes that such a “monitored consumption” system might produce.

[BTW, very interesting to read this in conjunction with our Saturday post on indigenous knowing. Isn’t giving the world of objects its full due - fully assessing the energy, materials and ideas that have gone into them - the kind of reverence to reality that comes from an indigenous perspective?]

Vinay’s full slide deck here.