MODULE 10 - USING YOUR MONEY

Using your money is a bit of a special category compared to the things we've talked about before. After all, anyone can reduce their footprint from wherever they're starting from. Anyone can use their voice and anyone could have some time at least. Anyone can use their vote. Anyone can use their frustration.

Using your money assumes that you have some money to use. But it doesn't have to be an enormous amount of money. If you're lucky enough to have a bunch of money, then we'll also provide some suggestions on where you might want to deploy that money -- not just based on our thinking, but based on what a lot of people have thought about in this space.

We won't cover here impact claims versus carbon offsets. We covered that topic in the carbon offsets module. You may recall that carbon offsetting is reducing emissions or paying for offsets that you then count against your footprint, and you can use it to get all the way down to a zero or a carbon neutral footprint.

The problem is that a lot of offsets really aren't doing that at all because they're not high-quality offsets. One way to go instead of doing offsets might be making carbon contributions to organizations that are doing good things for climate change. We covered that in the earlier module, and you can go back and take a look.

We will talk a little bit about the issue of divesting. If you own stocks in oil companies, for example, should you be divesting from those stocks.

There are plenty of organizations that could be supported with a little spare cash; it’s a bit of a different direction in terms of thinking about consumption. This isn't to tell you exactly what to buy or how to spend money. Perhaps it’s how not to spend money in terms of over consumption, which is certainly a big problem. A personal carbon price is an interesting twist on this idea of how to use your money. We'll go through that and the learning activity will point you to some resources that provide more information.

There are some very interesting resources out there on how to spend your money if you had a billion dollars. We're not going to cover that directly but we will point you to some of those resources if they might be interesting or useful to you.