Many solutions to our social, ecological, and economic challenges run up against the same question: “How will we pay for it?” Have you hit this wall in your own work or community? What if there were a different way to look at that question, one that reveals a way to fund the solutions we need? Tonight we will be hosting Sam Hummel from the Money Justice Collaborative to tell us more about his research. When we have the resources, people, and know-how to solve important problems, why should we be stopped by a shortage of numbers, which is all money is? What is the role of money creation and what concrete steps does he suggest?
More about the programme
Over 16 years helping universities, governments, and corporations implement sustainability programs, speaker Sam Hummel saw countless projects shelved for lack of funding. He also noticed that many of his peers were no longer working on implementing sustainability programs because they were instead trying to “find the money.” Despite their efforts in philanthropy, fiscal policy, social entrepreneurship, and socially responsible investing, available funding for sustainability solutions continued to fall far short of what was needed. Sam kept coming back to the same question: When we have the resources, people, and know-how to solve important problems, why should we be stopped by a shortage of numbers, which is all money is?
The 2008 financial crisis taught him that banks have special legal privileges that let them create new money when they lend. He began to ask: “If banks create money when they lend, why can’t we use that mechanism to pay for urgent social and ecological needs?” He was surprised to discover that this is absolutely possible, and used to be a common practice. In countries around the world, past social and political movements have tapped these legal privileges to channel huge amounts of finance into public purposes. Governments in some countries are starting to do this again. Come learn how citizens and advocacy groups can help accelerate this trend – and bring your elected officials with you!
In this talk, Sam will illuminate this funding mechanism in plain language. No prior experience with banking, finance, economics, or law is needed. The session is designed to provoke new thinking and spark concrete conversations about what’s politically and legally possible. The presentation will be followed by a discussion with scholar in banking and climate finance Anne Kervers.
About the speakers
Sam Hummel leads research and strategy for the Money Justice Collaborative, a North American nonprofit project that works with social movements to challenge the ways banking and monetary systems intensify social and ecological crises. Sam also studies monetary system design at Duke University and is an active contributor within the Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET), the Alliance for Just Money, the American Monetary Institute, Rethinking Economics International, and the Just Money Project. Previously, Sam helped build two associations that support thousands of higher education institutions, governments, and corporations in implementing sustainability programs: the Sustainable Purchasing Leadership Council and the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education.
Anne Kervers is a post-doctoral researcher at Utrecht University, where her work focuses on the bankability of sustainability transitions. Her areas of expertise include money and money creation, the Paris Agreement, climate finance, and the climate finance gap. Kervers researches the distributive effects of different configurations of money creation in the context of the need for a Paris-aligned financial sector. She has an academic background in Economics, Future Planet Studies, Applied Ethics, and Cultural Analysis, and previously worked at the head office of Triodos Bank.
The Money Justice Collaborative interviewed 50 leaders in climate finance advocacy, monetary reform, and banking scholarship. Our goal was to find out why the three groups are not working together more to challenge the government-granted privileges that enable banks to newly create 100% of the money they lend, including the money they lend to fossil fuel companies.1 In fact, these privileges are the largest source of financing for fossil fuels.
At SEVEN, we’re impressed by all the new, talented UvA researchers working on climate change. To introduce them, we publish a series of portraits of these up-and-coming climate researchers. The first interview in this series is with Anne Kervers, who is doing a PhD in political theory. Anne is working on climate-consistent banking and reassessing the underlying drivers of misaligned capital flows to broaden the range of instruments available to deliver Paris-aligned banking.
