The First and Last Bank

Climate Change, Currency, and a New Carbon Commons

Gustav Peebles, Benjamin Luzzatto (Autoren)

Buch | Softcover

264 Seiten

2025
MIT Press (Verlag)
978-0-262-04964-1 (ISBN)

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A groundbreaking approach to currency and community that may allow us to seize carbon from the atmosphere and offer a new tool in the fight against climate change. Through the ages, currencies have been based on all manner of objects from tobacco leaves to salt to gold to collateralized debt obligations. The only thing that this odd assortment of objects shares is the communal belief that these objects could harness and direct economic growth that they were, in a sense, fertile. In The First and Last Bank, Gustav Peebles and Ben Luzzato propose that atmospheric carbon could be seen anew as fertile in this same sense. In other words, carbon, rather than loom as waste in our skies, could instead be 'drawn down' to the earth by millions of currency users and the communally owned banks they rely on, where it could serve as a foundation of new biological life. Seeing currency as a powerful tool for collective action, the authors argue that dovetailing developments in digital currencies and the biosequestration of carbon have, together, made a new and radical intervention in the climate battle possible: a nonproprietary currency backed by sequestered carbon. This new currency would be managed via Wikipedia-style open-source policies that privilege sustainability and equity over endless growth and pollution. Because it is backed by sequestered carbon, the use of the currency would draw gaseous carbon out of the atmosphere and push it back into the ground, following the exact same trajectory as gold during the era of the international gold standard. While it is no silver bullet, such a currency would act as a necessary complement to wide-scale mitigation efforts, at the same time engaging ordinary citizens in the fight to reduce the dangerous levels of carbon in our atmosphere.

Gustav Peebles is Associate Professor of Anthropology at The University of Stockholm. His research is focused on the history of monetary policy. Ben Luzzatto is an interdisciplinary artist and professor at The Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore. His work draws from a variety of fields, including sculpture, ecology, architecture, and object design.

TABLE OF CONTENTS:
PREFACE: THE CAVALRY ISN’T COMING
CHAPTER 1: WASTE AS WEALTH
CHAPTER 2: BAPTIZING VALUE
CHAPTER 3: FOLLOW THE YELLOW BRICK ROAD
CHAPTER 4: THE BANKING COMMONS
CHAPTER 5: THE SKY-MINERS’ REBELLION
CHAPTER 6: DIGITAL DEMOCRATIZATION
CHAPTER 7: THE CULT OF SCARCITY
CHAPTER 8: MUSTERING A PLATFORM ARMY
CHAPTER 9: HOMEWARD BOUND

Erscheinungsdatum	10.06.2025
Zusatzinfo	16 BLACK AND WHITE ILLUS.
Sprache	englisch
Maße	152 x 229 mm
Themenwelt	Naturwissenschaften ► Biologie ► Ökologie / Naturschutz
	Wirtschaft ► Betriebswirtschaft / Management ► Finanzierung
	Wirtschaft ► Volkswirtschaftslehre
ISBN-10	0-262-04964-3 / 0262049643
ISBN-13	978-0-262-04964-1 / 9780262049641
Zustand	Neuware