I'm working out the html as you read this...

green backs are "business opportunities" that can be exploited without the bad business protocols. They rely on

"Only actions that deepen the question":

1. preserving natures portfolio,protecting genes possibly by copylefting genes
2. listening for instructional capital by copylefting university, especially Free U
3. facilitating the green span plan, especially the collapse of professions into unions
4. facilitating the green time slowdown, leading to 'end of time' and the epistemological collapse
5. anticipating nanotechnology dangers and offering core protections (i.e. biosafety)
6. Competing directly with "doubt that buys force" in professions that "manage risk", but which actually end up increasing overall regret (since they can only hedge against each other).

How to exploit them all? Make the most green backs as the green span plan is implemented?

Find a basis for currency that minimizes the risk of any party getting paid in a force-buying currency simply for raising old doubts (which should have an economic value of zero in any system reflecting global integration of knowledg).

Raising new doubts is more problematic, it seems there is definitely a need (as accepted in the Precautionary Principle) to integrate new doubt (e.g. "disaster scenarios" which are good examples of instructional capital when integrated into an overall set of projections) but panic raising can't be rewarded. Perhaps this is simply the role of fiction? Counterfactuals as scenarios? Is this what science fiction authors do for us?

So maybe it is only presenting old doubt as fact that can no longer get paid. References to history are passe. All value is in cautionaries of the future?

A renegade macro-economist that I know, believes that science fiction writers are the enemy of humanity, because their stories always end up proving that a fundamental change to our natures either a) won't kill us *all* or b) doesn't really change anything important. In other words, discounting the psychology of change, the pain of "future shock", our need to just *be* what we *are now*.

I suppose that is no longer what we can expect, that certainty of similarity between just-next and just-past, perhaps that is what we must now pay *for*... so the ultimate economic achievement is a machine that lets us leap backwards into the past. We won't even know whether it's physical, virtual, "real" in any specific sense. We won't care. We'll just want time to stop so that we can get off. Our villages will start to look like our fantasy reconstructions of the past. Nothing "futuristic" but much "magical". Hoo boy I can see it coming...

"How can any non-delusional person, elite or otherwise, not understand The Six Styles of Capital?" - Critt Jarvis

I am not sure *I* understand it. The relations between capital styles as bound up in the currencies are complex, and came out really all in a lump. I have various geometric models of the relationships, and bizarrely I came to the same conclusion as Bucky, independently, that Gravity itself is Love.

Canadian federal government policy is moving in this direction, slightly, The Prime Minister, Jean Chretien, has no ideas but he has announcements, especially "C$210 million over three yeras in new funding for "green" energy development and the Climate Change Action Fund"
"C$100 million for a new Sustainable Development Technology Fund - which will help companies develop new environmental technologies and bring them to market"
"C$100 million for a new Green Municipal Investment Fund - a revolving fund leveraging private sector investment, in such areas as waste management and water conservation at the municipal level."
plus a few more in the budget itself.

A real green energy market would be built on a green incubator with offices in Toronto, New York, Colorado, India, and a bald spot on the tundra.

To start it before the economics is at least integrated into a single testable thesis, is premature. Only a real theory can be tested. Once the green span plan makes sense, we can commit to experimental apparatus in the form of offices. Of course I would happily build complete offices that reflect the current guesses, for cash, for someone else. Rick/eColony, maybe?

Call me Hindmost. I take "only actions that further the question".

From John Purkis and Mike Nickerson's ( "choose.sustain") Green Economics Caucus:
"If you've ever wondered why environmental initiatives frequently run into a brick wall called 'the economy', you may be interested in joining us. The way our economy operates presently compounds some environmental and social problem, but it need not be that way.

To explore and reveal the economic constructs that keep us from our environmental goals, and, to look for and share economic techniques that encourage sustainability.

No person provides directly for all of his or her needs.

Economics looks at the process by which people exchange one sort of help for another. Economic exchange need not be based on self-interest or exploitation. When two people care for each other their exchanges are an basic form of economics.

There is cause for concern with our present economic system, however, because it only places value on activities which "make money" (i.e. have an immediate positive trade value in cash) even if those same activities create debts and risks in the environment, our communities, and to personal and family health.

There are other ways to cultivate exchange and account for how we provide for each other. As social and environmental activists run up against the present systems need for perpetual expansion, there is a growing interest in understanding why it operates as it does and in finding other ways in which we might manage our cooperation which don't damage the Earth, undermine communities or make us sick.

also: Don Smith, Alan Appleby, Laura Levesque, Jim Elliot

"Our ignorance is not so vast as our failure to use what we know." M.K. Hubbert

"Natural Capitalism" is an essential reference, one of the most pivotal books in modern economics: http://hubley.com/cite/economists.htm - I would point out Lester Thurow and Amartya Sen as also highly influential in the modern economics and institutions. If the GPO could achieve a synthesis of Hawken/Lovins, Sen and Thurow in its policy, and explicitly state the need to resolve prospect theory problems (arising in the cognitive-psychology work of Tversky and Kahneman and summarized in their 2000 publication "Choices Values Frames") and just society problems (arising in the social-psychological moral-reasoning work of Kohlberg and Gilligan http://hubley.com/cite/reed-1998.htm) with the anarchic-economics of Gandhi and Moore (http://hubley.com/cite/moore-1985.htm), we might have some eyebrows raising. We already cite Gandhi all over the place in BASF, so this less-radical more-quantitative institution-building modern stuff ought not to be very controversial. I would also note http://hubley.com/cite/lev-1999.htm for an overview of the issues arising with our (500 year old) "accounting" as one of the problems in reorganizing the economy around explicit "life values".

See http://www.greenparty.on.ca/basf but note the title's problems:

You cannot "Build" something natural, only "grow" it. You are not necessary "Sustainable" just because human beings think so, and it is now clear that the GPO and GPC will not be mounting any active defense of the word "sustainable" against competing definitions such as those used in the Dow Jones Sustainable index. And the "Future" never actually comes.

I favor "Growing Green Governance" or something else that includes the word "Green", implies natural processes, and puts the focus on all forms of real world governance, not just the limited academic form one finds in futurism.

-- Anonymous, March 20, 2000