Welcome to the
cooler economy
Earth's atmosphere viewed by astronauts on International Space Station on July 31, 2011.
Time. Temperature. Capital.
Our species is running out of time. Everyday we grow the capital and wealth while the climate temperature increases. Each of us must now begin by becoming innovators and engage in cooling our personal lifestyles contributing to growing the capital and wealth creation in a cooler economy. This is the quickest timely path forward for humanity.
Time
Temperature
Capital
Cooling our home planet is orders of magnitude easier today than on the unpredictable tomorrow after the next climate tipping point.
Temperature should no longer increase if we are to mitigate the catastrophic future for generations to come.
A cooler economy ends the curse of the Midas Touch, wherein everything capital touches, it heats the climate.
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"The idea of climate change should be seen as an intellectual resource around which our collective and personal identities and projects can form and take shape. We need to ask not what we can do for climate change, but to ask what climate change can do for us... Because the idea of climate change is so plastic, it can be deployed across many of our human projects and can serve many of our psychological, ethical, and spiritual needs."
– Mike Hulme, Why We Disagree About Climate Change
Making the
Inconceivable
possible
Climate Conscious Planetary Economy:
A Zero Degree Cooler Economy and Global Cultural Shift
Climate change offers humanity a rare opportunity in the lifetimes of current and future generations to innovate our way into ensuring human survival by capitalizing on the unprecedented opportunity for flourishing latent human potential that can only evolve during climate changes.
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Since the current onset of climate change follows the unprecedented growth of human potential from the advent of agriculture, industrial and information revolutions the humanity is more prepared than ever to realize its next level of evolutionary potential by engaging in addressing the climate change, as long as we are able to avoid the collapse of the civilization.
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Humanity's transition to the cooler economy that embodies ecological feedback at evolutionary scale creates novel opportunities for timely innovations to continue life on earth.
Challenge
Imagine a day in our lives that adds zero increase to in our planet’s temperature? We call it a Zero Degree Day. Zero Degree Day doesn’t exist yet. But we can get there starting with Reduced Degree Days. The Zero Degree Project is creating a safe space for citizens to innovate. We are developing processes, methods and algorithms to create and track Reduced Degree Days and Zero Degree Days as the new assets of the cooler economy. The initial challenge is to get to 7.6 billion Zero Degree Days, i.e. one Zero Degree Day per person, the quickest, so we can demonstrate a cooler economy is realizable.
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Overview
This initiative is led by Principal Investigators Syed Shariq, PhD and Thomas George, PhD at the Kozmetsky Global Collaboratory at Stanford, along with Neeraj Sonalker, PhD at Center for Design Research at Stanford.
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Zero Degree Project nurtures innovators who are sensitive about themselves and the world, inviting them to innovate, develop, practice, share and evolve their Zero Degree Prototypes, through their participation in the prototyping collective.
In the cooler economy, the Zero Degree Indices that we will co-create through value conscious economic prototyping activities will substitute for the current financial indicators such as GDP, S&P 500, DOW Jones etc.
These new indices will resonate with the value that society is yearning for and would readily support through their investment of capital and time.
This value creation will serve as the foundation of Universal Basic Assets.
Collective
Zero Degree Project community of value-conscious practitioners are engaged in prototyping of the cooler economy that regenerates the relationship between time, temperature, and capital.
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Together, we will develop algorithms for linking human bodily and socio-economic metabolic processes with climate temperature thermodynamically, and using such algorithms to generate much needed essential direct feedbacks to practice innovators and participants at the field sites so that they can innovate and measurably transition their Zero Degree time and capital allocations towards accelerating the cooler economy.
UNIVERSITY
OF CALIFORNIA
SANTA CRUZ
Community Development
Fellows
Katie Roper
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Everette Program
University of California,
Santa Cruz
UNIVERSITY OF
CALIFORNIA
BERKELEY
Zero Degree
Policy Analysis in Practice
Sebnem Tugce Pala
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University of California, Berkeley
Research-creation & speculative intercessing
Erik Bordeleau, PhD
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Global Center for Advanced Studies
GLOBAL
CENTER
FOR
ADVANCED
STUDIES
Stanford
University
Rapid Prototyping Practicum
Syed Shariq, PhD
Neeraj Sonalker, PhD
Thomas George, PhD
Melissa Vo
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Kozmetzy Global Collabortory &
Center for Design Research
Stanford University
University of Hawaii
at
Hilo
Ground
Zero
Initiative
Ming Wei Koh, PhD
Shawon Rahman, PhD
Gregory Paul
Scott Laaback
Carly Wyman
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Center for Getting Things Started &
University of Hawaii at Hilo
“To make the world work for 100% of humanity in the shortest possible time through spontaneous cooperation without ecological damage or disadvantage to anyone.”
- Buckminster Fuller
Climate Science
Pertinent climate change research and guiding scholarship.
Professor Alvin Roth
Nobel Laureate​
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Victor M. Yakovenko
Physicist
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Eric Posner and Glen Weyl
Law
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Elinor Ostron
Nobel Laureate
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Jean-Pierre Dupuy
Social and Political Philosophy
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Intergovernment Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)
United Nations
Daniel Hartley
English and American Literature and Culture
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Srinivas Aravamudan
English, Literature, and Romance Studies
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Werner Herzog
Film Director
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David Spratt and Ian Dunlop
Researchers
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Kate Marvel
Climate Scientist
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We Should Never Have Called It Earth > Read​
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Hothouse Earth
It is either a Hothouse Earth or a "Cool house" Earth that sustains human life
