Demian Klenk is a big fan of what he calls “ethical self-interest.”
How could self-interest be ethical? Aren’t ethics about the greater good?
What about when the greater good aligns with your self-interest — for example, making a profit not by harming the planet, but by helping it?
That’s the intersection where Klenk intends to stake his claim. The tool — 6c-Index, his baby, is a blockchain-based digital index where investors can fund projects engaged in the urgent work of reducing atmospheric carbon to fight climate change.
“Most investing … comes with a big grain of guilt,” Klenk told Ricci Truong of the CamaPlan Podcast, “because you invest in one of the major indices or industries that you know isn’t necessarily good for the planet or your children or whatever.”
But there’s one investment vehicle that doesn’t come attached to that guilt — carbon credits.
A quick primer on the carbon credit — according to international agreements, companies set limits on the carbon emissions a company can produce in a given industry. If the company produces more carbon than allotted, they must purchase “carbon credits” to offset their excess emissions.
These credits are essentially derivatives that represent activities to reduce the carbon in the atmosphere — planting trees, fertilizing soil with carbon-absorbing algae, or running massive decarbonizer machines that pull carbon right out of the atmosphere and sequester it for industrial use.
“The market is almost a trillion-dollar market already,” Klenk said. “You know, companies like Tesla would be insolvent without carbon credits because it’s too expensive to make their cars. So, they get awarded these credits, which they sell to GM.”
“That’s all great,” he said, “but it’s actually not working. We’re still putting more carbon in the atmosphere cuz we haven’t turned it into a boom economy.”
“We got to change the mentality to the way, you know, the dot com boom, or the real estate boom or the crypto boom [went]. We gotta get everyone really excited about and this has the potential of being the greatest boom of all because it goes back to the ethical self-interest. This is about, hey, we could get rich and clean up the planet.”
