The reality is it is really very hard to get a new idea up and running. There are a million things to learn and if you don’t have a presence, even in a small school, it is hard.

I have done it before in building a small company into one that performs a substantial proportion of the emissions accounting for companies in Australia. That took 12 years.

One of our co-founders also started a oil and gas company and built it into a large value junior producer in a similar time frame.

Not easy. No one on our team has the slightest experience in building this kind of community run organisation, we are learning the technology on the fly and laboriously building our networks.

But that isn’t a deal breaker because the idea of an Emissions Reduction Currency System is so much bigger than we are.

For an exhaustive discussion you can see our website http://www.maiamaia.org (under construction in the odd hours I have available) and blog http://www.themaiamaiaproject.blogspot,com.

But to be short.

Greenhouse gas reductions have some inherent properties that make them the perfect basis for community run currency systems.

1. They are easily measurable (a government supplied factor x your power bill, etc…)
2. They have a real economic value that to the general community according to economists and scientists must be many times what any government has ever put on them in the face of opposition from vested interests.
3. They are democratically accessible. Anyone can create value in one of these schemes (using the existing model of discounts given by local businesses to schools).
4. They are an indicator of good will because a greenhouse gas reduction identically benefits everyone. The US dollar says ‘In God We Trust’ in an effort to acrue good will to the national currency. Emissions reduction currency embodies this good will implicitly, which also makes them universally convertible to other schemes on the basis of shared interest without any central authority.

In brief, I believe emissions reduction currencies are the most powerful quietly subversive idea I have ever had the honour to be associated with.

But we are realistic – as you suggest we are trying to work with others now that are more established. The idea is the important thing (which actually is fairly original – I have found few other examples in 2 years of researching and no ideas developed as fully in the way we have). That being said we would be very interested in working with P2P to develop it as a standard tool within your network.