interviews
When Voting Fails
by Dr. Martha Jones
July 9, 2020
This interview with Dr. Martha Jones, a Professor of History at The Johns Hopkins University, was conducted and condensed by franknews.
frank | Hi! I’m curious to know what’s on your mind right now.
Dr. Martha Jones | I live in Baltimore, Maryland. It's where I teach and where I live. When the spring 2020 protests began, for a moment my city was of interest to the national media. As uprising began to break out in other places across the country, the country recalled that we had had a major uprising here in 2015 after the killing of Freddie Gray. And still, in 2020 national gaze quickly turned away when Baltimore didn't comport, somehow, with expectations. The demonstrations here didn't look like Minneapolis. They didn't look like Louisville. They didn't look like LA or New York.
Media is essential to amplifying and projecting the voices of the disenfranchised. At the same time, the media is moved by the sensational.
There is something untenable for me about the view that we must rise to the sensational in order to be heard.
It's not just that we have to raise our voices. We have to raise them, and that spectacle must be sensational before journalists will deeply partner and become embedded in the scene.
What did Baltimore teach itself in the time between Freddie Gray in 2015 and George Floyd in 2020?
It's important to say I didn't live here in 2015, so I'm learning in real-time about my city.
The city had not only its own sense of outrage but its own vision for how to be. This comes in part from the roles played by seasoned community activists, folks who were part of the 2015 uprising who are still here and have remained deeply committed. In 2020, they have helped to shape an extraordinary series of demonstrations here in Baltimore.
In Baltimore, we were also getting ready to elect a new mayor in June, though with a limited capacity to get to the polls. Maryland had committed to mail-in voting without much debate or objection. But there were troubles with getting the ballots into people's hands and getting the right ballots into people's hands, so in-person polling places had to be opened up. People, in the midst of protests, in the midst of a pandemic, showed up here in Baltimore to cast their ballots. That evidenced another side of the civic culture here. People were tuned in to the fact that there was an election, and people came out for that.
Participating in democracy need not be an either-or proposition. We can simultaneously be in the streets, engaged in direct protest, a democratic tradition in this country, and we can show up to the polls.
That is what I saw happening in Baltimore, and it happened in the midst of a pandemic that encouraged us to stay home and to do nothing at all. Of course, that is complicated by important public health concerns. But I think an insistence that democracy is a participatory culture and not simply a set of principles or a structure, is an important part of what I play out here in real-time.
How does civil unrest and protest lend itself to more civic participation?
The story of the 1960s is instructive for me. It was simultaneously the scene of voting rights and the scene of uprisings. The two facets of that time may not often be told together. But they were not wholly antithetical to one another at all. Immediately in the wake of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the number of African American voters grew importantly and significantly. It is that context that we move into an era of uprisings in cities like Detroit and Los Angeles and New York. Part of what can be learned by voting, are the limits of the ballot. Yes, political power is embodied in casting a ballot and in electing a candidate. At the same time, harnessing political power requires more than showing up at the polls. Demonstrations are another way of being heard and influencing law and policy. I am an historian of Black politics in 19th century Baltimore, which may seem like a very long time ago. Still, that history includes important lessons in how people created their own power in an era, time, and place when they could not vote at all.
I'm interested in what we do when voting fails us, which it almost certainly will.
On this, I draw from the lessons of African American women in history. African American women have been engaged with politics for a long time, and for most of that time, they could not vote. They organized, they lobbied, they used men as surrogates. And when by a state constitution, or the 19th Amendment, or the Voting Rights Act of 1965, they received legally sanctioned political power, they were ready. When African American women got the vote, they were ready to use it as fully formed political actors because they had been constructing their own power for a very long time.
I want to talk more about the prominence of Black women through the history of protest and civil unrest in America.
One of the moments most well known to people during the civil rights movement is the march in Selma, Alabama. Among the best remembered of those marchers, is a young man who is today among our most venerated members of Congress, John Lewis. Lewis was among the scores who marched across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in the name of winning voting rights, only to be met with brutal police violence.
Behind the scenes was a Black woman named Diane Nash. She cut her political teeth organizing sit-ins in Nashville, Tennessee as a student at Fisk University. She played a critical role in the work of the Freedom Rides in 1961 by sending young people from Tennessee further South to replenish the ranks of the Riders after many had been brutally attacked. It was Diane Nash who, long before Martin King and the SCLC assented to the strategy, came to Selma to wage a voting rights campaign.
Nash was an organizer, planner, and orchestrator, but we don’t see her photo as folks make that fateful march across the bridge. In those long moments, she was back in Selma making sure that there would be medics available when people are brutalized. To me, this is an example of a woman who taught us how leadership takes many forms. She taught that political leadership must embrace many forms of action. Nash never took the stage as a charismatic, upfront character. Still, she was someone who, when we look closely at the scenes in Selma, becomes critical to that story.
Contrast Nash with someone like Mississippi’s Fannie Lou Hamer. The two were peers but worked very differently. Hamer not only understood, she deliberately looked to exploit the cameras to propel her image, and her message, and project efforts to win voting rights in her home state and transform Democratic Party politics nationally. The two women worked by way of different philosophies and differing styles. They adopted divergent tactics even. Taking the work of Nash and Hamer as two parts of a whole during the Modern Civil Rights Movement helps us think in expansive ways about how political power can be won and how it can be wielded.
Looking back is one style more effective than the other?
It's difficult to say, because they are parts of a whole. The thing that knits them together, in some sense, is violence. Nash is deeply committed to nonviolent direct action, the sit-in, the march – but she still sees violence as essential. There's an often-quoted moment when she speaks with federal officials from Washington who tell her to desist from sending young people to join the freedom riders: “You know, we understand that we are walking into a brutal scene. The young people had made their wills the night before they left.” Hamer also knew violence and had a defining moment early in her career when she was stopped, detained, jailed, brutally beaten and sexually assaulted by police after attempting to register to vote.
The women I write about are all, each in their own way, wrestling with the violence that is woven into American politics. They know that violence will be directed unashamedly at their very bodies.
That core insight, one that sits at the foundation of Black women’s political consciousness, extends back to confrontations between enslaved women and their enslavers. In our own moment, the tragic killing of Breonna Taylor is the latest example of how Black women's bodies remain the targets of a brutal politics of violence. This thread runs through Black women's political philosophy and their practice, across time.
African American women have always been plagued by a specific form of violence: sexual violence. So many of the Black woman activists who I write about eventually explain their confrontations with either sexual violence or the threat of sexual violence. This not only informs their tactics, but sets the goals for political power must accomplish. When Tarana Burke gave us the Me Too movement in the 21st century, she was echoing a long-standing critique. Black women aim to use their power to end the scourge of sexual violence, a story that has an origin in the history of slavery but doesn't end with emancipation. It continues until this day.
Thank you for your time, I appreciate having this conversation.
One of the dangers of a conversation like this is to leave the impression either that nothing changes or nothing can change. I struggle with that. History is a tough endeavor in that regard. It is possible to look across two centuries and recognize what hasn't changed.
And still, I am inspired. Black women have been the conscience of this nation since its inception. They have studied the lay of the land. They have thought very hard about our founding ideals. They have also set the bar when it comes to what liberty, equality, and dignity mean. They have shared their ideas, pointing us where the bar is. Listen and Black women will remind you of the ideals that we all should aspire to, individually and collectively. The women I write about say no racism, and no sexism. Period. They say that in 1820 and have waited ever since for us to catch up as a nation. I've watched Breonna Taylor's mother, Tamika Palmer, speak, and I think I recognize something familiar in that act. She is an African American woman, representing her deceased daughter, and at the same time speaking to all of us about the violence which, as a nation, we must not, cannot, and should not allow.
There is nothing enviable about this position in body politic. And it's not enough. Still, voices that speak fundamental truths, that hold up indelible principles, that insist upon equality and dignity for all are absolutely essential. Someone has to set the bar high in a nation that has been built upon countless indignities and injustices.
Someone has to remind us that ideals animate this country, not interests, convenience, or pragmatism.
Someone has to do that. Black women took up that mantle in the earliest days of this republic and they continue to bear that burden even today, in the 21st century.
interviews
Blockchain For Climate
by Joseph Pallant
January 29, 2020
frank | Hi Joseph! Excited to speak with you. Will you start by introducing yourself?
Joseph Pallant | Sure! My name is Joseph Pallant and I am the founder of the Blockchain for Climate Foundation – our goal is to put the Paris Agreement on the Blockchain. I am also the Director of Climate Innovation at Ecotrust Canada and a community scholar in Blockchain for Climate at the Dahdaleh Institute for Global Health Research at York University. This confluence of roles and really is a mashup of my 15 years of work in carbon offset development, and my excitement for using emergent technology like blockchain that can help solve a bunch of the problems we encounter in the climate space.
In layman's terms, what do you mean by your “excitement for using emergent technology like blockchain that can help solve a bunch of the problems we encounter in the climate space?”
Climate has been my day job for 15 years. And about three years ago, in the spring of 2017, I read an article about blockchain and about initial coin offerings that coincided with the start of the ICO boom. It was a really long read, and by the end of it, I had three burning thoughts:
My first thought was, "Oh my gosh, I need to drop everything and get into crypto." And my second thought was, "Heck no. I have a months-old baby, a mortgage and I love my work. I really need to NOT just drop everything." Then my third thought was, "Well, if we could put the Paris Agreement on the Blockchain and operationalize Article 6 (the carbon trading aspects) of this international agreement, THAT would be the killer app for blockchain, vis a vis climate.”
You see, a major issue with achieving the vision of the Paris Agreement rests on the ability to pay for the economic transformation that needs to happen to actually beat climate change. Carbon markets and “Article 6” can help achieve this by connecting countries so that you could have capital flow from one country to another where it was more cost effective to reduce greenhouse gases, and then have environmental assets, these carbon credits called “Internationally Transferred Mitigation Outcomes” or ITMOs under Article 6, flow back in the other direction in return. The opportunity that I saw in Blockchain was a tool built for the making and keeping of distributed ledgers, but moreover creating digitally scarce token, digitally scarce units that can be bought, sold or traded and really have that portability and verifiability of value.
So, over the next year I got to explore a lot of different models using Blockchain for selling carbon credits or for verifying and auditing of projects, but I kept coming back to where I started, focusing on this last mile of connectivity between countries to enable this key part of the Paris Agreement. We've subsequently received a lot of good feedback and buy-in on this use case, so we remain hard at work to make it a reality.
Amazing. Can you break down this portion of the Paris Agreement and who the buy-in is from? How do you get people to participate in this? I think my barrier to fully wrapping my head around how this all works is that the Paris Agreement is policy driven – and when I look at Blockchain and how Crypto works, policy seems behind.
Yeah. So. You make a really great point. Basically, the part in the Paris Agreement that we're really trying to address is Article 6 of the Paris Agreement, which lays out the rules for trading of carbon credits from one country to another. So, kind of at that simple level, the Paris Agreement sets rules around doing those trades internationally.
What we're trying to do is build a piece of infrastructure to enable that to happen, transparently and effectively.
Over the last few years, lots of people have tokenized intangible assets on the Ethereum blockchain using the “ERC20” token standard, where they're tokenizing any manner of things. We're basically building a tool allowing governments to tokenize carbon credits that they're approving for transfer out of their country.
Can you define what a carbon credit is?
At its simplest level, a carbon credit is an environmental asset created by implementing a project that reduces or removes one tonne of carbon dioxide emissions from the atmosphere. In our case, there's a couple of ways it could happen. But theoretically, a project developer could say… Hey - this is probably way too much detail?
No, not at all.
Ok! Thank you. If you were to do a carbon credit project here in Canada where, for example, we could go and work to improve forest management practices in a logging tenure in the province of Ontario and go from releasing a million tons of carbon dioxide per year, down to 500,000 tons per year.
After going through the credit project development and verification process you could be issuing 500,000 tons of carbon credits per year. We have well established processes for doing this domestically, and for that we don’t need the blockchain. But say now Canada wants to trade those carbon credits to Norway?
If we then take those 500,000 tons of carbon credits and sell them to Norway, their total carbon footprint is reduced by half a million tons. But what we now need to do, and this is really the crux of our work, is to make sure that Canada is adds those 500,000 tons back on to their carbon inventory and basically increase our footprint in Canada by 500,000 tons because we sold those away. Does that make sense?
So you're tokenizing the carbon credits.
Yeah. What we want to do is tokenize the 500,000 tons of carbon credits, so Canada in that issuance and tokenizing event would be taking them off of their national carbon inventory and readying them for transfer to another country.
And then why this is important is because the carbon credits might get sold to Norway, but then Norway might sell it to England might sell it to Germany, might sell to Japan. And so these units are going to be potentially, quite widely traded. And that's good in a lot of ways because it allows for a bigger market, allows for more capital invested and greenhouse gasses reduced.
Countries will be able to see how many tonnes of carbon dioxide they’ve bought and sold, and then they compare that against their actual national carbon footprint that gets calculated and reported to the UN. So, you might see Canada starting off with 730 million tons of emissions this year. And then we might sell off 5 million tons of carbon. So, we'd actually have to increase our footprint to 735 million tonnes. Then we might buy a hundred million tons of carbon credits to get us toward that Paris commitment. So then you'd subtract that off our inventory and so on. We’re excited about the building our platform because it really leverages the nature of Blockchain, natively in tokenizing that environmental outcome and making it into a digital asset. This supports clarity in that bookkeeping and clarity of ownership, all of which we're doing to support getting more capital to reducing greenhouse gases.
How did you start Blockchain for Climate? Again, how did you start getting people to buy into this idea of getting carbon credits onto the Blockchain?
There's so many different things to do in Blockchain and so many different things even to do with climate and Blockchain. I was able to really grasp a moment of clarity and focus and say, "We're just going to work on this one tool to operationalize the Paris Agreement." We had an original team of five folks, including myself, that actually met down at DCTRL, which is literally an underground cryptocurrency members club here in Vancouver, British Columbia. So, we met there, I think, in December, 2017 to just kind of talk about what was going on here.
Basically that initial team came together and then we kept it at five for about another year because we were still just sort of fleshing out exactly what we needed to do. We had an early blockchain developer, a person from the climate space, a person from governance and then also another crypto-native and an awesome individual from the clean energy space. And so the team really started to figure out what type of Crypto tools we need, started to figure out how to really craft the use case.
It was really the launch of CryptoKitties that helped me realize kind of how to make Crypto work for carbon credits. Are you familiar with CryptoKitties?
We did an interview with Blake Finucane about crypto art, and she spoke a lot about CytoKitties.
That's awesome. CryptoKitties was created here in Vancouver, and it's an amazing story for a lot of reasons. But the part cogent for my story was how each CryptoKitty has eight attributes like eye shape and background color and fur color and so on, displayed on the kitty’s token page and coded on the blockchain. And I'm like, "This is exactly what we need to be able to have each individual carbon credit token carry all of the information of its genesis carbon offset."
A quality carbon credit is valuable and credible because of the information that backs it, all of the project information, scientific detail, auditing… Instead of eye color, we could have the name of the credit project. And instead of background color, we could have, which country was this project developed in? And what sector is it? Is it forest carbon, and so on and so forth.
So that was an "Aha" moment, because we know about Bitcoin, Ethereum and Dogecoin and the fact that people are starting to tokenize things on Ethereum. But for our project to really work, you needed to be able to know everything about that credit from that token. It was really CryptoKitties and non fungible tokens that was the first foot to fall and set us on our way.
In March 2018, I sat down and spoke with one of my collaborators, one of the five, Matt Lockyer here in Vancouver. He had just submitted ERC-998, which is an improvement or a tool proposed to the Ethereum blockchain that allows you to create “crypto composables.” This would basically allow your non fungible token, like your CryptoKitty, be able to own other non fungible tokens, like other CryptoKitties. Or you could tokenize bags of CryptoKitty cat food, and have them belong to your CryptoKitty token. Or your CryptoKitty could hold an ether token. That ability to nest other non fungible tokens within other non fungible tokens was the other foot to fall. Because of course the thing that created the huge slowdown in the Ethereum network near the end of 2017, and a lot of ruckus about CryptoKitties was that you can actually only move one of them per transaction on the blockchain. And so that wasn't going to work for our climate system where we're going to have billions of tons moving all the time. But that ability to do that composability where we could say, issue a project token that could then issue and hold 50,000 individual carbon credit tokens? Now we're talking.
So as that got clear and we moved forward, then we opened up the gates for more team members. Since then we've grown to a team of around 20 kind, generous folks, contributing from a wide variety of life experiences and professional expertise. Because you know, we have a subject matter focus on blockchain and climate, but building this into fruition takes a lot of other skillsets. We’re really lucky because these folks are all profoundly skilled, and leaders in their respective fields. It brings home the fact that we’re working on a critical task, and bringing compelling tools to the job of getting it done.
Conceptually, I understand. So there's what, 196 countries in the Paris Agreement?
Yeah.
When you say that you have people buying in to the project who are you talking about exactly? If country is the answer, how many of the 196 are currently operating on the blockchain?
Right. So that's our next frontier. It’s been neat just getting people in the space to understand and get on board with this idea. Those are kind of the precursors to the other types of buy in which we'll need ultimately to get some or all of the 196 countries on board. I think a stretch goal is to create like the tool for everybody to use the tool for Paris Agreement-compliant issuance and exchange of carbon credits . But what's more likely is that we'll have a smaller number as few as two, two's our minimum, one buyer, one seller, to trial this. And so right now we've come back from the UN COP25 in Madrid, and we're working on building a national party working group of countries to co-create, utilize and champion our system. We have a notional goal of six varied countries interested in working with us over the next year and a half to try to refine and support the building of this tool so that by this time next year we are actually able to allow countries to trade carbon credits through our system. We're hoping to get countries that are keen to use the tool and will say, if you build it and it works, we'd like to use it. We also want them as users to really provide their feedback. What do they want to see? What are they allergic to?
Why is this a blockchain manifestation of the Paris Agreement a better option than what's happening right now?
With the slight caveat that I'm still learning, and there's always a risk that I'm smack talking a little bit, which is really not the goal. But basically, Article 6 in the Paris Agreement, which is the one around international carbon trading, started out as only one page. Before work could start to build a tool like we’re building to enable really clear transparency around these international trades, countries have to do a bunch of work around hammering out the Article 6 rule book. By 2018, all the other Articles that have solidified their rules and might be like 40, 50, 100 pages. But active opposition to critical parts of a rulebook for Article 6 has meant that, even though the rules are looking a lot better now after COP25, they’re still not complete and universally agreed upon. This has a number of impacts, including that further building of a transparency tool like ours by official channels has paused until some future date.
Under the earlier Kyoto protocol, there was a system of carbon credits called the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM). International trade of these credits was registered on the International Transaction Log or the ITL. Every two years the ITL recorded the sum total of all the pluses and minuses, all of the trades that each country would do of carbon credits. An interesting nuance under the CDM, was that the “developing world” could create carbon credits and sell them to the “developed world.” And that would lower the footprint of the purchasing country, usually in Europe or Japan, but they didn't actually add the corresponding emissions back onto the carbon footprint of the selling country. It was really a one way flow.
Now that all countries of the world have committed to reducing emissions, if you are going to sell a carbon credit and somebody else is going to remove it from their footprint, YOU have to put it back on your footprint as the seller. And so this International Transaction Log, my understanding is they're not going to even start building it or its replacement until Article 6 has been finalized, which will hopefully be this November in COP26 in Scotland, but we don't really know. The fact that they can't start building that till all the rules are made and the fact that we hear it will take around three years just to build that once all the rules are made, really slows down the ability to roll out to a carbon market and mobilize capital to fight climate change. Those are some of the reasons why we decided we needed to do this.
The other main reason that's kind of intangible, or emotional, or maybe I’m just being overtaken by crypto geekery, is that if the world goes with the old way, they're locking in this old technology and it’s not really sufficient for the task at hand. If we’re going to mobilize the billions of dollars of capital and deploy it in every corner of the world to fight climate change, we’re going to need the technological advancement of tools like blockchain. So really we're building our platform to enable corresponding adjustments between carbon accounts to happen in real time rather than every two years.
It’s a mis-fit. It just doesn’t feel right. Also, this use case really jives with the nature of crypto and of blockchain, which tokenizes values or tokenizes an outcome. This is exactly what was needed to solve this problem of how to issue, exchange and reconcile carbon credits under the Paris Agreement. When you have a tool that fits the task so well, it just kind of calls use it. So that's a cluster of the reasons why we are.