Podcast: Graham Barnes- Renewable Energy & Finance

[RE]

Off the microphones of Graham Barnes, RE and Monsta666

Follow us on Twitter @doomstead666

Friend us on Facebook

Aired on the Doomstead Diner on September 11, 2013

Discuss at the Podcast Table inside the Diner

In this Podcast with Graham Barnes from FEASTA, we discuss aspects of Finance as applied to Renewable Energy systems, and Investment Models for developing more resilient systems.  Our Podcast was inspired by Graham’s article Designer Currencies and Behavior Change you can read in full over on FEASTA.

At Feasta, we started using the term ‘Designer Currency’ in 2011, partly as a reaction to what we thought were unsatisfactory adjectives (complementary, alternative, community), but mainly to underline the fact that no currency is a ‘neutral facilitator of exchange’ as imagined by orthodox economics, and that therefore currencies can be legitimately designed to promote specific outcomes, values and behaviours. We named our Facebook Currency Activists Community accordingly in January 2012 [1] and sketched out some early thinking in ‘The Lot of the Currency Designer’ a paper presented to the International Social Transformation Conference in Split in July 2012 [2].

A delegate to the recent Community Currencies conference in The Hague proposed that changing behaviour should be the ‘fourth function of money’, so it may be timely to explore the implications of this line of thinking a little further.

This article considers three particular questions: i) How are values implicitly embedded in a currency? ii) If objectives are made more explicit, who defines those values and how are they validated? iii) What type of explicit behaviours might currencies reasonably promote? and then revisits the core function of means of exchange in the light of this analysis.

Part II of the Podcast will focus more on alternative Currencies which might evolve over time, and the various functions of Money as a Store of Value and Exchange Medium, and will be available here on the Diner in the next couple of weeks.

RE

• Tweet