Carbon quantitative easing

Last updated

Carbon quantitative easing (CQE) is an unconventional monetary policy that is featured in a proposed international climate policy, called a global carbon reward. [1] [2] [3] A major goal of CQE is to finance the global carbon reward by managing the exchange rate of a proposed representative currency, called a carbon currency. The carbon currency will be an international unit of account that will represent the mass of carbon that is effectively mitigated and then rewarded under the policy. The carbon currency will function primarily as a store of value and not as a medium of exchange.

Contents

CQE is designed to manage the exchange rate of the carbon currency by enacting an internationally agreed floor price for the currency. The floor price should rise predictably over many decades in order to deliver on the main goals of the 2015 Paris Agreement.

CQE is the name given to the currency trading operations of central banks that have agreed to cooperate and coordinate their efforts in order to guarantee the floor price for the carbon currency. In addition to the currency trading, central banks should telegraph their intentions by advertising the future exchange rate of the carbon currency to market participants, thereby increasing private demand for the carbon currency in the foreign exchange market.

With CQE, it is proposed that market participants will accept the new carbon currency as an investment-grade asset given that it will have relatively low financial risk, relatively high appreciation, and relatively high liquidity.

History

CQE was first proposed in 2017 by Delton Chen, Joël van der Beek, and Jonathan Cloud [1] in order to create a new socioeconomic roadmap for delivering the main goals of the 2015 Paris Agreement. CQE was reviewed in 2018 by Guglielmo Zappalá as part of an economics thesis, [3] and it was first mentioned in the mainstream media in 2020 with two online articles appearing in Bloomberg's business news service. [4] [5]

CQE has yet to be included in mainstream narratives on the economics of climate change even though it has the scope to address many critically important climate-related systemic risks, such as weak carbon pricing, lack of climate funding, and lack of societal cooperation. [2]

Monetary policy

The ideal implementation of CQE will involve every central bank in the world, however CQE can be implemented with just the central banks of the 20-40 largest economies, approximately, given that this group of central banks represents about 80-90% of the world economy by nominal GDP. Prior to applying CQE, the participating central banks need to be given a mandate that allows them to manage the exchange rate of a currency that represents mitigated carbon. The representative currency is the economic instrument of the global carbon reward policy. The currency will establish a positive price signal [6] that will complement carbon taxes, cap-and-trade and non-market policies that are also implemented.

Carbon currency

The representative currency should be denominated in carbon mitigation services. A unit of account of 1000 kg CO2e mitigated for a 100-year duration, or similar, [6] is recommended. The proposed representative currency may be called a carbon-backed currency, or more simply it may be called a carbon currency. The carbon currency will not be legal tender in any country, and it will only be traded as a financial asset.

The carbon currency will provide three key functions: it will function as a financial incentive, as a store of value, and as an accounting instrument for recording the carbon stocktake under the global carbon reward policy. The total supply of the carbon currency will be proportional to the total mass of carbon that is mitigated and rewarded. All of the carbon stocktake will be retired from carbon markets, and so the carbon currency will not act as a carbon offset because there will be no carbon offsetting under the policy.

Central banks that participate in CQE will be instructed to create additional bank reserves (MB) to buy the carbon currency in open markets. The expansion of MB and the associated currency trading should be coordinated in order to give the carbon currency an exchange rate floor that is calibrated to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement. [6] The purpose of CQE is to underwrite the long-term floor price of the carbon currency while the supply of the carbon currency is increasing over time. The supply of the carbon currency will increase when it is issued to enterprises as a financial reward for their climate mitigation services.

Carbon exchange authority

CQE and the carbon currency will be managed by a supranational authority, called a carbon exchange authority. The carbon exchange authority will ensure that the devaluation of national currencies via CQE will be as uniform as possible between nations, and this is to ensure that the resulting monetary inflation is politically acceptable and economically benign. The currency devaluation process does not apply to the fiat currencies that are not part of the CQE program.

The carbon exchange authority will be responsible for the mitigation assessments, and also for the accountability, fungibility and transparency of the carbon currency. For this reason, central banks that participate in CQE are not required to undertake any technical assessments of climate mitigation services, thus allowing them to focus on their other responsibilities.

Market policy

CQE is an essential part of the global carbon reward policy however this policy also includes a sophisticated new market policy for managing the supply-side of the carbon currency. The market policy is needed to enable the orderly issuance of the carbon currency and the provision and enforcement of service-level agreements on a case-by-case basis. The service-level agreements are needed to define the rules for estimating the mass of carbon emissions that are avoided, and the mass of carbon that is removed from the ambient atmosphere. The service-level agreements are also needed to define the standards for monitoring, reporting, verifying, and policing, and to address any defaulting by participating enterprises. [6]

Potential advantages

The historical failure of the global community to share the costs of climate mitigation is sometimes described as a type of prisoner's dilemma. [7] [8] A potential advantage of CQE is that it could be used to overcome the prisoner's dilemma by financing a global carbon reward without creating any new debts for governments, businesses, or citizens. This capacity to finance climate mitigation at the global scale—and without imposing any direct costs on stakeholders—could be instrumental in avoiding political disputes and maximising cooperation at all levels of society. CQE offers an entirely new channel for scalable climate finance that could be used to protect the global commons.

CQE and the carbon currency could be implemented using a number of different digital technologies and settlement systems. One option is to request central banks to purchase the carbon currency with conventional bank reserves. In this option, the commercial banks, public banks and currency traders could act as intermediaries between the wholesale and retail markets for the proposed carbon currency. Alternatively, the participating central banks could develop their own Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) that act like digital cash. [6] [9] With the second option, the carbon currency could be developed and traded as a new type of CBDC on a common platform for the inter-bank trading of CBDCs.

Comparison with other monetary policies

Quantitative easing

Quantitative easing (QE) by central banks typically involves the purchase of government bonds, corporate bonds and other financial assets to increase the broad money supply (M1)—either directly or indirectly. CQE, on the other hand, will result in a direct increase in M1 with the additional currency being injected into the economy as debt-free finance for climate mitigation services. [3] [6] CQE is therefore a targeted form of QE. CQE is also strongly biased towards decarbonising the economy, whereas conventional patterns of QE have been found to support carbon-intensive industries. [10]

Green quantitative easing

Green quantitative easing (green QE) involves the trading of green bonds or climate bonds by individual central banks. According to a study by the Foundation for European Progressive Studies, the application of green QE could help to mitigate climate change but on its own could not substantially influence the Earth's global average surface temperature or prevent severe climate change. [11] CQE is significantly different to green QE because CQE aims to coordinate and aggregate the efforts of the major central banks, thereby generating an outcome that is more strongly correlated to global reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. Unlike green QE, CQE will not require central banks to undertake any technical assessments of climate mitigation, and this is because the proposed carbon exchange authority will take responsibility for the accountability, fungibility, and transparency of the carbon currency.

Modern Monetary Theory

Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) is a heterodox macroeconomic theory that is concerned with increasing the supply of national currencies for funding public goods and encouraging full employment. CQE is significantly different to the monetary policies that are proposed under MMT, and this is because CQE is designed to expand the money supply for the world economy by coordinating central bank currency operations to achieve an international goal. MMT, on the other hand, aims to expand the money supply of an individual nation for domestic reasons. Furthermore, CQE and the carbon currency do not depend on borrowing, debt creation or interest charges. This is because the time value of the carbon currency is embodied in service-level agreements that require the physical mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions over the long-term, potentially for a 100-year duration. These service-level agreements define the standards for monitoring, reporting, verifying, and policing of the carbon stock take. [6] CQE is unlikely to pose a direct inflationary risk for any one country because CQE attempts to spread the resulting monetary inflation across the globe.

Gold Standard

CQE and the associated carbon standard are analogous to the gold standard under the Bretton Woods system. This is because both standards are designed to link the value of national fiat currencies to the management of specific chemical elements that play a pivotal role in the organisation of an industrialised global civilisation.

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Central bank</span> Government body that manages currency and monetary policy

A central bank, reserve bank, national bank, or monetary authority is an institution that manages the currency and monetary policy of a country or monetary union. In contrast to a commercial bank, a central bank possesses a monopoly on increasing the monetary base. Many central banks also have supervisory or regulatory powers to ensure the stability of commercial banks in their jurisdiction, to prevent bank runs, and in some cases also to enforce policies on financial consumer protection and against bank fraud, money laundering, or terrorism financing.

Environmental finance is a field within finance that employs market-based environmental policy instruments to improve the ecological impact of investment strategies. The primary objective of environmental finance is to regress the negative impacts of climate change through pricing and trading schemes. The field of environmental finance was established in response to the poor management of economic crises by government bodies globally. Environmental finance aims to reallocate a businesses resources to improve the sustainability of investments whilst also retaining profit margins.

This aims to be a complete article list of economics topics:

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Global financial system</span> Global framework for capital flows

The global financial system is the worldwide framework of legal agreements, institutions, and both formal and informal economic action that together facilitate international flows of financial capital for purposes of investment and trade financing. Since emerging in the late 19th century during the first modern wave of economic globalization, its evolution is marked by the establishment of central banks, multilateral treaties, and intergovernmental organizations aimed at improving the transparency, regulation, and effectiveness of international markets. In the late 1800s, world migration and communication technology facilitated unprecedented growth in international trade and investment. At the onset of World War I, trade contracted as foreign exchange markets became paralyzed by money market illiquidity. Countries sought to defend against external shocks with protectionist policies and trade virtually halted by 1933, worsening the effects of the global Great Depression until a series of reciprocal trade agreements slowly reduced tariffs worldwide. Efforts to revamp the international monetary system after World War II improved exchange rate stability, fostering record growth in global finance.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Monetary Authority of Singapore</span> Singapores central bank and financial regulatory authority

The Monetary Authority of Singapore or (MAS), is the central bank and financial regulatory authority of Singapore. It administers the various statutes pertaining to money, banking, insurance, securities and the financial sector in general, as well as currency issuance and manages the foreign-exchange reserves. It was established in 1971 to act as the banker to and as a financial agent of the Government of Singapore. The body is duly accountable to the Parliament of Singapore through the Minister-in-charge, who is also the Incumbent Chairman of the central bank.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Monetary policy</span> Policy of interest rates or money supply

Monetary policy is the policy adopted by the monetary authority of a nation to affect monetary and other financial conditions to accomplish broader objectives like high employment and price stability. Further purposes of a monetary policy may be to contribute to economic stability or to maintain predictable exchange rates with other currencies. Today most central banks in developed countries conduct their monetary policy within an inflation targeting framework, whereas the monetary policies of most developing countries' central banks target some kind of a fixed exchange rate system. A third monetary policy strategy, targeting the money supply, was widely followed during the 1980s, but has diminished in popularity since that, though it is still the official strategy in a number of emerging economies.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bretton Woods system</span> Financial-economic agreement reached in 1944

The Bretton Woods system of monetary management established the rules for commercial relations among the United States, Canada, Western European countries, and Australia as well as 44 other countries after the 1944 Bretton Woods Agreement. The Bretton Woods system was the first example of a fully negotiated monetary order intended to govern monetary relations among independent states. The Bretton Woods system required countries to guarantee convertibility of their currencies into U.S. dollars to within 1% of fixed parity rates, with the dollar convertible to gold bullion for foreign governments and central banks at US$35 per troy ounce of fine gold. It also envisioned greater cooperation among countries in order to prevent future competitive devaluations, and thus established the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to monitor exchange rates and lend reserve currencies to nations with balance of payments deficits.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Foreign exchange market</span> Global decentralized trading of international currencies

The foreign exchange market is a global decentralized or over-the-counter (OTC) market for the trading of currencies. This market determines foreign exchange rates for every currency. It includes all aspects of buying, selling and exchanging currencies at current or determined prices. In terms of trading volume, it is by far the largest market in the world, followed by the credit market.

In macroeconomics, an open market operation (OMO) is an activity by a central bank to give liquidity in its currency to a bank or a group of banks. The central bank can either buy or sell government bonds in the open market or, in what is now mostly the preferred solution, enter into a repo or secured lending transaction with a commercial bank: the central bank gives the money as a deposit for a defined period and synchronously takes an eligible asset as collateral.

Debt monetization or monetary financing is the practice of a government borrowing money from the central bank to finance public spending instead of selling bonds to private investors or raising taxes. The central banks who buy government debt, are essentially creating new money in the process to do so. This practice is often informally and pejoratively called printing money or money creation. It is prohibited in many countries, because it is considered dangerous due to the risk of creating runaway inflation.

The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to finance:

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Quantitative easing</span> Monetary policy tool

Quantitative easing (QE) is a monetary policy action where a central bank purchases predetermined amounts of government bonds or other financial assets in order to stimulate economic activity. Quantitative easing is a novel form of monetary policy that came into wide application after the financial crisis of 2007‍–‍2008. It is used to mitigate an economic recession when inflation is very low or negative, making standard monetary policy ineffective. Quantitative tightening (QT) does the opposite, where for monetary policy reasons, a central bank sells off some portion of its holdings of government bonds or other financial assets.

A fixed exchange rate, often called a pegged exchange rate, is a type of exchange rate regime in which a currency's value is fixed or pegged by a monetary authority against the value of another currency, a basket of other currencies, or another measure of value, such as gold.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Economics of climate change mitigation</span> Part of the economics of climate change related to climate change mitigation

The economics of climate change mitigation is a contentious part of climate change mitigation – action aimed to limit the dangerous socio-economic and environmental consequences of climate change.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Currency war</span> Competition between nations to gain competitive advantage by manipulating monetary supply

Currency war, also known as competitive devaluations, is a condition in international affairs where countries seek to gain a trade advantage over other countries by causing the exchange rate of their currency to fall in relation to other currencies. As the exchange rate of a country's currency falls, exports become more competitive in other countries, and imports into the country become more and more expensive. Both effects benefit the domestic industry, and thus employment, which receives a boost in demand from both domestic and foreign markets. However, the price increases for import goods are unpopular as they harm citizens' purchasing power; and when all countries adopt a similar strategy, it can lead to a general decline in international trade, harming all countries.

The monetary policy of China aims to keep the value of the Renminbi, the official currency of the People's Republic of China, stable and contribute to economic growth. Monetary policy concerns the actions of a central bank or other regulatory authorities adopt to manage and regulate currency and credit in order to achieve certain macroeconomic goals.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Central bank digital currency</span> Digital form of fiat money

A central bank digital currency is a digital currency issued by a central bank, rather than by a commercial bank. It is also a liability of the central bank and denominated in the sovereign currency, as is the case with physical banknotes and coins.

Sustainable finance is the set of financial regulations, standards, norms and products that pursue an environmental objective. It allows the financial system to connect with the economy and its populations by financing its agents while maintaining a growth objective. The long-standing concept was promoted with the adoption of the Paris Climate Agreement, which stipulates that parties must make "finance flows consistent with a pathway towards low greenhouse gas emissions and climate-resilient development." In addition, sustainable finance had already a key role to play in the European Green Deal and in other EU International agreements, but since the COVID-19 pandemic its role is even more important.

The global carbon reward is a proposed international policy for establishing and funding a new global carbon market for decarbonising all sectors of the world economy, and for establishing and funding a new economic sector dedicated to carbon dioxide removal (CDR). The policy is market-based, and it will offer proportional financial rewards in exchange for verifiable climate mitigation services and co-benefits. The policy approach was first presented in 2017 by Delton Chen, Joël van der Beek, and Jonathan Cloud to address the 2015 Paris Agreement, and it has since been refined.

Window guidance or informal guidance, is an informal policy instrument used to regulate the supply of credit in an industry or sector. Window guidance typically involves the use of benevolent compulsion in order to regulate the supply of credit as a way to achieve policy targets such as sustainability. Window guidance involves the use of monetary policy instruments including lending quotas as an informal way to subsidize or regulate the volume of credit in an industry or financial sector. Window guidance is often associated with the Bank of Japan's policies during the Japanese economic miracle.

References

  1. 1 2 Chen, Delton B.; Beek, Joel van der; Cloud, Jonathan (2017-07-03). "Climate mitigation policy as a system solution: addressing the risk cost of carbon". Journal of Sustainable Finance & Investment. 7 (3): 233–274. doi:10.1080/20430795.2017.1314814. ISSN   2043-0795. S2CID   157277979.
  2. 1 2 Chen, Delton B.; van der Beek, Joel; Cloud, Jonathan (2019), Doukas, Haris; Flamos, Alexandros; Lieu, Jenny (eds.), "Hypothesis for a Risk Cost of Carbon: Revising the Externalities and Ethics of Climate Change", Understanding Risks and Uncertainties in Energy and Climate Policy: Multidisciplinary Methods and Tools for a Low Carbon Society, Cham: Springer International Publishing, pp. 183–222, doi: 10.1007/978-3-030-03152-7_8 , ISBN   978-3-030-03152-7, S2CID   158251793 , retrieved 2021-08-25
  3. 1 2 3 Zappalà, Guglielmo (2018). "Central Banks' Role in Responding to Climate Change: Monetary Policy and Macroprudential Regulation". doi:10.13140/RG.2.2.33035.80167.{{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  4. Robinson, Kim Stanley (22 April 2020). "Making the Fed's Money Printer Go Brrrr for the Planet". Bloomberg Green. Archived from the original on 2020-04-23.
  5. Perti, Josh (24 April 2020). "How About We Try Some 'Carbon Quantitative Easing?'". Bloomberg Quint. Archived from the original on 2021-07-11.
  6. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 "Central Banks and Blockchains: The Case for Managing Climate Risk with a Positive Carbon Price". Transforming Climate Finance and Green Investment with Blockchains: 201–216. 2018-01-01. doi:10.1016/B978-0-12-814447-3.00015-X.
  7. Harford, Tim (24 January 2020). "Climate change and the prisoner's dilemma". Financial Times. Archived from the original on 2020-01-25.
  8. Soroos, Marvin S. (1994). "Global Change, Environmental Security, and the Prisoner's Dilemma". Journal of Peace Research. 31 (3): 317–332. doi:10.1177/0022343394031003006. ISSN   0022-3433. JSTOR   425380. S2CID   110106958.
  9. Chen, Delton (7 June 2021). "Is a carbon currency feasible?". Global Carbon Reward. Archived from the original on 2021-05-27.
  10. Matikainen, S.; Campiglio, E.; Zenghelis, D. The climate impact of quantitative easing. Policy Paper, May 2017. CCCEP & The Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment.
  11. Dafermos, Y., Nikolaidi, M., & Galanis, G. (2018). Can green QE reduce global warming? GPERC, Policy Brief, July 2018.