Okay, before I propose this new project let me get something off my chest: capitalism is not bad. I know, evil things are happening all around you and that makes you upset. I know it bothers you to see the rich exploit the poor. I know it pisses you off to watch the masses guzzle down consumer culture like cheap champagne. But before you latch on to an idea like open source barter matching or gift economics or, God forbid, Bitcoin, take a moment to reflect on good bits of Capitalism. At the end of the day Capitalism and Socialism are more alike than they seem: they both hold aloft Work as the ultimate vocation of the individual, and see the road to the actualization of the Citizen as one paved by nice, shiny concepts like Labor and Artisanship. But where they fundamentally differ is in their philosophy on how to incentivize and prioritize labor, in how they figure out who should be doing what. Capitalism models itself on nothing less wondrous than Nature itself. It looks out on the world and sees all the flora and fauna living in perfect balance and harmony, and marvels at the fact that the entire ecosystem--the economy of the environment--operates with such efficiency and with such stability. Organisms and systems of organisms in particular demonstrate remarkable resilience and resourcefulness. They can adapt with remarkable speed to new situations and they generate absolutely no waste. How do they do it? Well, basically laissez-faire capitalism. There's no central committee or working group having meetings to plan how many salmon should spawn next season or how much grass to grow today, but rather everything just happens. The whole system functions like a flock of birds. Each individual follows a very specific set of very simple rules (try to reproduce, try not to die), which is enough for the system itself to demonstrate emergent behavior. And that behavior can be rich, complex and tremendously efficient.

So what's my point? My point is don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. Listen to the lessons of capitalism and figure out how to use this extremely effective, robust philosophy to further your own goals. Don't try to be paternalistic in shaping people's behavior. Stop trying to tell me what I "ought" to be buying and stop trying to make me feel ashamed for the way I live my life. I don't say this because it hurts my feelings or because it annoys me. I say this because I sympathize with your position and I want you to see the economically viable path to realizing the things you believe in. In short, look at what makes Capitalism so successful and try to emulate it.

Try to take a step back and realize just how unrealistic you're being about certain issues. Let's look at a simple example: purchasing consumer goods. Assuming for the sake of argument that in a perfect world everyone would buy locally-sourced, renewable, fairly traded, organic goods and produce, let's try to figure out how to actually get people to make the responsible choice. As I see it the problem is mainly one of information. Appreciate for a second that in a free market any buyer makes three assertions every time he makes a purchase. The first and only explicit assertion is that the buyer would like to be the owner of the good that he is purchasing. This is the assertion with which we are all familiar, and it is usually the only one that people consider when evaluating a purchase. The other two assertions are implicit: that the buyer approves of the methods by which the good was brought to market and that he approves of the methods by which that good will be disposed of. These are the assertions that we usually ignore, and they are the ones that usually get us into trouble from an environmental standpoint. When I go to buy a cup of coffee, for example, the only two things I usually consider are how much the coffee costs and how much I need that cup of coffee (which to my mind is usually quite a lot). The things that I don't consider are where the coffee came from, whether anyone was exploited in producing that coffee, how many resources were consumed in producing that coffee, and where the coffee cup is going to go when I throw it away. Ideally those hidden costs would be factored into the cost of that cup of coffee, but aside from paternalistic and morally legislative taxation there doesn't seem to be any real way to make a green, eco-friendly, low impact cup of coffee cost less than one that was made by roasting coffee beans in an orphan furnace, or something.

When I say that the problem is one of information what I mean is that it's very hard to get access to the information that helps me make good purchase decisions. Imagine I wanted to be sure that every time I bought a cup of coffee I was 100% sure that it was as green a cup of coffee as possible. It's probably not sustainable to rely on some outside agency to give coffee a green certification, so instead I have to do all the research myself, investing my own time and energy into probing the dark secrets of every single slice of the vertical supply stack all the way from the grower to the coffee house. Yeah, it's not going to happen. I do not have one fraction of the free time necessary to write a dissertation on the coffee that I buy, let alone to give the same care and attention to every purchase that I buy. I need it to be easy, ridiculously, Wikipedia-easy for me to know everything about the genesis and disposal of the goods I purchase. This right here, is what makes capitalism work: simplicity. Before I cared about whether or not my coffee cup was made from bio-degradable corn fibers all I had to do was look at the cost of the coffee, look in my wallet and then make a choice. Granted the machinations and machinery that brought all the ingredients together--the coffee, the cost and my disposable income--are huge and dizzyingly complex, but the bedrock of the entire system is this simple act of consumer choice. This elegant simplicity is what makes Capitalism so stable and so scalable.

Now we come to the proposal itself: make green spending easy. Create some way to empower consumers to learn more about the things they buy. Make it fun and rewarding for them to practice socially and economically aware spending. Their purchase power is tremendous--I don't think I exaggerate when I say that a citizen probably has more power as a consumer than as a voter, but most people do not realize how much impact they can have simply by changing the way they buy. Help them see this impact.

Let's make a mobile app with a barcode scanner that will instantly tell a consumer everything they need to know about what they're buying. When they scan a loaf of bread, tell them more about the company, tell them how much fresh water and coal was used to bake that bread. Or better yet, take all that information and condense it into a single number, a number signifying on a scale of 1 to 5 how "green" a purchase it is. And give suggestions for other, more benevolent purchases. 

Let's make a web app that links against a user's credit card, like Mint, monitoring his purchases and helping him see how his purchases affect the world. Let him keep track of his personal impact, showing him not only areas where he could improve or minimize his consumption but more especially areas where he excels. Show him just how much his choices are serving the betterment of the world he lives in. Create social incentives for good purchasing decisions. Put him in touch with the local, organic farmers that he supports. Give him perks and benefits for making good choices. In short, make doing the right thing fun and easy. Help establish a positive feedback loop of green capitalism.

Each of these I see as something that I could put together myself; given the very modest extent of my own coding abilities I assume that these would be easy projects for someone more qualified. If you're interested or have your own ideas then let's talk more.

Come on.