For a long time now, we have questioned the overall approach to climate action. Change is needed, but as a society, we do not want to cause mass suffering while trying to prevent preventing mass suffering. Many fear the new "green revolution" will decimate our global economy and cause many a dark winter. To mitigate the damage such a large-scale transformation may cause, we must first implement an infrastructure that can manage it.

There has been so much focus on fossil fuels that often major environmental issues go unnoticed. Looking for a quick fix, governments seem to be more focused on shutting down businesses that have a negative impact instead of fostering companies that will produce positive outcomes.

Working with NOAH Water Technologies, we discovered that much good could be done with just a little bit of funding in the right areas. The lack of financial backing kept us from significant water treatment projects that could have had an enormous environmental impact. These projects included cleaning highly polluted and toxic lakes in India, contaminated drinking water sites in Canada, and providing cheap desalination worldwide.

Countries are talking about spending trillions of dollars on increasing solar and wind energy when a few million could have made a huge environmental impact if spread over several focused projects.

Every week, it seemed like the government funding we had lined up for a project was being pulled due to a change of staff, election cycle, or just slowed to a complete halt in the general bureaucracy. So naturally, this led to some frustrations at our existing funding solutions for environmental remediation.

A word from Randy

I WAS IMMEDIATELY CAPTIVATED when I was introduced to the technology that became the foundation of NOAH Water technologies. It came at a time in my life when I was approaching retirement age and looking for a way to give back—what better way than treating water with a high-volume, low-cost solution that creates genuinely healthy water.

I believed that it would be immediately apparent to anyone looking at this technology. That proved true for the average person we talked to; however, it soon became evident that governments and other stakeholders had their own agendas—agendas that frequently made environmental impacts a secondary concern.

Along the way, we met a host of other innovators facing the same challenge. They had truly remarkable technologies but no clear path to bringing them to market. This was when I began to conceptualize the problem as a three-legged stool.

To bring new technology to market, you need to have three things happen concurrently: You need the right technology, you need adequate funding, and you need a customer. Far too often, innovators having spent their seed money developing their intellectual property to a working model discover that access to the market presents a financial barrier that is too high to scale.

As a result, typically, they look for government support to clear the final hurdle. However, after filing mountains of paperwork and jumping through bureaucratic hoops, optimism turns to despair as the rejection letters accumulate.

It wasn't until I was asked to submit a proposal for "Cleaning up" Lake Okeechobee that I began to see why the current approach to environmental issues was not working.

The pitch to me started in a familiar way, "Randy, the government has a ton of money for cleaning up Lake Okeechobee. Can your technology do it?"

In this case, the pitch was made by someone who didn't really care about the scope of the problem but was trying to skim a finder's fee off the top.

Nevertheless, I spent several months investigating the situation, looking at what had been done in the past and reflecting on why the efforts to date have largely made the situation.

As I contemplated the centralized approach to solving the problem, it became clear why large government-funded projects would never solve these types of environmental issues. The problem is too big and too complex for a single solution. Furthermore, restoring the ecosystem doesn't fit within a 4-year election cycle, which is why politicians favor grand, expensive ventures that inevitably make matters worse.

Spoiler alert! The money wasn't as readily available as I was promised.

However, the exercise proved valuable as it helped crystalize my thoughts on a decentralized approach to environmental initiatives.

I discovered that the solutions to restoring the Lake Okeechobee ecosystem already existed with the collective intelligentsia of the Universities in Florida; what was lacking was a framework to allow them to put their innovations to work.

When James had the idea of the ecoSystem I realized that  it was similar to the concepts I had already formulated through my contemplations of the Lake Okeechobee problem.

As a newcomer to the world of Decentralized Finance, I was intrigued to find how well DeFi meshed with my musing on Decentralized Environmentalism.

A hundred thousand people lying on the pavement in a vain effort to shame the government to do something will inevitably fail. That's not the government's role. A hundred thousand people—each contributing something practical to solve problems in tangible ways —will make real, measurable change.

A Decentralized Approach to Environmental Initiatives

It was the desire to generate meaningful environmental impacts coupled with the frustration of working through the existing paradigm that the ecoToken System was born.

The ecoSystem is a launchpad for environmental remediation projects, a carbon credit exchange, and a place where anyone can easily offset their carbon emissions.

The ecoToken System solves four significant issues holding back environmental progress:

Funding, Centralization, Unnecessary Bureaucracy, and Economic Incentives.

The solution involves a positive feedback loop centered around the ecoToken.

There is a lot of innovative technology capable of solving real-world problems sitting idle because the necessary funding is not available to bring it to market. Typically, high upfront costs are needed to get a project up and running. Furthermore, it isn't easy to persuade financial institutions or investors to support projects when profits may take longer than expected to manifest. Through the ecoSystem, innovators can make their pitch for funding not simply based on the potential economic return of their technology but also the positive environmental impacts. Supporters can then choose to fund projects according to their personal objectives: weighing each project's economic, ecological, and social benefits.

Centralization adds layers of bureaucracy between planning, funding, and implementation of beneficial outcomes. While consuming a lot of money that could otherwise be devoted to environmental initiatives, the bureaucracy is subject to political interference, often prioritizing projects that may have lesser environmental value for ones that generate better talking points.

Through their internal inertia, centralized bureaucracies aren't adept at adjusting quickly to new challenges, reflecting local objectives, or solving multiple problems in diverse areas. The ecoToken Systems decentralized approach to environmental initiatives brings the environmentally conscious closer to those who can make the most significant impact in their area of concern. Furthermore, this direct support ensures these impacts happen on much shorter timeframes than a government bureaucracy can do.