Climate change is a global coordination failure

Climate change is one of the most pressing problems facing humanity. Our best scientific models show that over the next 50-100 years, we’ll face anything from significant economic disruption to a complete breakdown of the social fabric. In the worst case scenarios, we could face the literal extinction of our species.

Preventing further climate change is a technically surmountable task, even without additional technological innovations. What is preventing us now from stopping further climate change is a global coordination failure. Our global leaders of governments and corporations have failed to coordinate well enough to stop climate change.

Corporates have suffocated all attempts to address the crisis properly

Meanwhile, hundreds of millions of individuals like us around the globe are eager to do something, yet we too have lacked the coordination mechanisms to take meaningful action. We’ve marched, we’ve voted, we’ve tweeted and greenhouse gas emissions keep on rising.

Corporate interests have pushed narratives that have further disempowered us, such as the idea that we’re each responsible for our individual carbon footprint, which was established by a BP sponsored ad campaign to distract us from the higher leverage point of corporate accountability. Many of us have gone into denial about the scope of the problem facing us. Others have sunk into despair, recognizing the reality of our predicament but, without being in a position of power, helpless to do anything that actually moves the dial. Yet one of our biggest sources of power to create change goes completely untapped.

We hold the power over corporates to enforce decarbonization

Through savings and retirement accounts we already have ownership in companies that have failed to step up to the challenge of decarbonizing. Executives of those companies continue to keep their heads in the sand on climate change and are doing considerable damage to our future and the future of our assets. Together, we can switch from passively supporting these companies by holding ownership of them, to actively pushing them to decarbonize.

Small groups of wealthy investors have been coordinating through activist hedge funds over the past 10-20 years to profit by pushing companies they own to make positive environmental and social changes. But so far, average investors have been left out of participating in that change because we have lacked the coordination mechanisms. With recent advances in blockchain technology, we finally have the infrastructure for shareholder activism on a much bigger scale than ever before.

Blockchain allows us to leverage our collective power

ClimateDAO is built on top of the Polygon blockchain and uses legal/smart contracts to bind code execution to real world action. Anyone can participate, trusting the protocol even without trusting any particular individual working on it. The code and legal contracts that allocate capital cannot be changed by anyone individually, and distribution of capital is completely transparent on the blockchain.

The protocol functions by incentivizing participants to propose and vote on high leverage activist campaigns at the intersection of shareholder value and social impact. We find the best opportunities through quadratic voting, gamification of activist research, and platform design that encourages the best ideas to float to the top. The best ideas, according to our consensus mechanisms, will be programmatically executed by the DAO.

We need to you to make it happen

Everyone who wants to increase shareholder value while encouraging corporate decarbonization is welcome in ClimateDAO. You can join as an Angel to join us for the journey, or as a Climateer who actively participates in researching and executing activist campaigns. Follow us on Twitter and turn on notifications to learn how to get involved.

The era of decentralization has begun.

The time to decarbonize is now.

💚💚,

The ClimateDAO Team 

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