featured image | Todd Kent
This ambitious paper explores a fundamental question: what would it mean to align our systems of governance and economics with the Earth’s ecological limits? Drawing on the idea of embodied sunlight—the energy underlying all life and production—the author reframes today’s crises as symptoms of a broad-ranging imbalance between human systems and planetary realities. He proposes a three-part model: local/regional commons to measure and steward resources, planetary institutions to set environmental limits, and states and corporations to make goods accessible within those boundaries.
Abstract
The world is entering a new chapter in its history. Competition over energy and material resources is intensifying as waste heat accumulates in the atmosphere and Earth surfaces, yet governance regimes are ill-equipped to manage today’s cascading ecological, fiscal and geopolitical crises. The sovereign state order of extractive global commons is splintering along two distinct trajectories: expansive multilateral/multipolar economies and decentralized planetary commons bound by ecology. This article develops the latter as a basis for a biosocial contract to rebalance commons, public goods and private property on a planet of eight to ten billion people. Anchored in subsidiarity, sovereign restructuring calls on nations to devolve new domains of decision-making to local, municipal and bioregional commons, while transferring responsibility to planetary institutions for binding limits on resource disruption and the requisitioning of public goods beyond the scope of nation-states and corporations. In turn, states will focus on fiscal allocation and redistribution, while corporations concentrate on the production and dissemination of goods and services. Since existing price and currency systems are continually undervaluing the ecological constraints that stem from declining net energy and increasing systemic risk, the article introduces a planetary accounting stack derived from H.T. Odum’s transformity metrics of emergy. To generate public familiarity and legitimacy for collective governance of embodied sunlight, biocapacity revaluation, adaptive cycles and biophysical renewal, an education campaign in support of these new constitutional and monetary systems is proposed. 2026-2050 is the last secure horizon for planetary negotiators to agree on a compact for biosocial governance under conditions of peaceful adaptation, safe contraction and conscientious decline.
Maximum Power for Population Biocapacity through Commons, Public Goods and Private Property
The global economy faces unprecedented challenges, from climate change and resource depletion to financial instability and technological disruption. But implementing new financial and accounting models at scale is not possible under the present system of governance. This article describes how a regenerative social contract could be negotiated that algins the ecological conditions of Earth Systems with municipal/bioregional communities, global institutions and state/corporate entities — each with distinct roles and shared responsibilities through international law and governance. Before we examine this higher-order system of biocapacity for the planet, where people are custodians of their own land, seas, environment and atmosphere (Chakrabarty, 155-217, 2021; Syll, 2023), we briefly review the governance models that have led civilization to this turbulent moment in history.
For one thing, the entropy of waste heat, arising from the intentional actions and unpaid accounts of colonialism that have scorched the planet for the past five hundred years, is catching up with us now through ecological overshoot, climate debt and intergenerational inequality. Driven by European powers from the 15th to mid-20th century, colonialists dominated foreign territories by exploiting their cheap labor, resources and trade. As the empires extended their power and authority over vast territories from the Americas to Africa and Asia, they defended their practice of exclusive occupation and coercion as a sovereign right. Yet colonial rulers denied sovereignty for the colonized peoples, while expanding global order through slavery, extraction and industrialization. As these hierarchies created social and economic imbalances between global resources and human sustenance, the world lost sight of the energetic symbiosis between commons, public goods and private property, creating extreme conditions and requiring a program for survival (Brandt, 1980).
Another reason for these global disparities stems from the social contract proposed in the 17th century by Thomas Hobbes, who called for sovereign governments to protect their citizens through a security covenant, thus avoiding social discord and “a war of all against all”. Instead, the Enlightenment and Reformation versions of post-Christian sovereignty enabled the world’s ruling classes to co-opt their governments by securitizing private goods through loans and bonds, repossessing public goods and confiscating people’s commons as free resources (Kaul et al, 1999). This enabled the nation-state to bundle these vital functions into one container: territory, identity, law, violence, taxation, money and diplomacy. But commitment to progress and development through the freedom from other autonomous individuals has given way to global conflicts over resources. Climate stability, biodiversity, pandemics, AI compute, supply chains, and capital flows don’t respect borders, revealing how the sovereign bundle misfits the system it was meant to steer.
A third reason for the inattention to our shared life-support systems is the conflict of distinct forms of state capitalism pursued by both the United States and China, where sovereign boundaries and rules play a central role in directing investment, managing strategic industries and shaping financial architecture. The broader issue concerns the institutional expression of national sovereignty in a globalized economy. In both countries, the state asserts its sovereign authority not merely over territory but over the structures through which economic value is produced, denominated and circulated. In both countries, state authority over finance—rather than purely market-driven allocation—has become increasingly centralized. This convergence illustrates how globalization has not dissolved sovereignty but instead reconfigured it around financial infrastructures. Monetary rivalry between China and the United States now extends beyond economics into technology, diplomacy and geopolitics. Digital currencies, sanctions regimes, and financial alliances are all instruments through which each state seeks to secure its sovereign influence over the circulation of global capital. In this sense, the emerging competition is not simply a struggle between two economic systems but a deeper confrontation over the future architecture of global sovereignty itself.
This leads to a fourth reason why a new model is necessary. As the world unbundled private property from commons and public goods, it created critical imbalances in meeting human needs and generating sustainable economies. This left the sovereign system epistemologically ordered on the logic of institutional growth without biophysical limits, rather than the thermodynamic order of energy constraints. Many nations have long forgotten that economics emerges from biology: that the demand in the supply-demand model is essentially human and social need, especially the food we eat that empowers our work. Reunifying biology and economics will require a new understanding of power, not as material efficiency, but as the capacity of matter to self-replicate through the consciousness inherent in biology. As we recognize how sovereign behaviors have incurred massive debts that can only be reconciled through a larger system of accountability, what would it take for citizens to claim the right to live within the life-force of our birth as custodians of the planet?
A new dialogue is necessary to establish the Earth System as a legal, political and economic basis for transactions between creative entities. Through a biosocial contract, national governments would delegate power to their own communities and regions through subsidiarity, allowing decisions to be made at the lowest possible level, the commons. In turn, citizens agree to let governments transfer power to new planetary institutions that represent the highest level of shared consequence, the biosphere. The duty of states and corporations, then, is to ensure the organization and accessibility of resources with emphasis on the sustenance of their populations (Odum and Barrett, 2005, 1-281). How shall the world move from sovereignty as absolute territorial supremacy to a constitutional federation of functions, including local self-determination for provisioning, planetary trusteeship for boundary conditions and national capacity for redistribution? Based on the principle that biophysical systems maximize their use of energy where it is available (Odum, 2007), global negotiators may conclude that state sovereignty must be transformed downwards, upwards and from within nations. Figure 1 outlines the broad domains of a biosocial contract for the global commons through:
- downward empowerment of local/municipal/bioregional commons by nation-states
- upward assignment of constraining power to planetary institutions by nation-states
- lateral responsibilities of nation-states for the fiscal allocation of energy-based resources, and corporations through the production and distribution of goods
Transforming the global commons through an evolutionary hierarchy of energy begins with national governments delegating sovereign power to their own communities and regions through subsidiarity, allowing decisions on resource management to be made at the lowest possible level — the commons. This decentralizes authority away from debt-based capital and toward regenerative places like food sheds, watersheds, forest/grassland regions and coastal systems. In turn, governments transfer power to new global institutions that represent the highest level of shared consequence — the biosphere. The renewed purpose of states and corporations is to ensure the organization and dissemination of resources and issuance of credit for the sustenance of their populations (Odum and Barrett, 2005, 1-281). This rebalancing of power through the adaptive cycles within regional systems will allow the self-sustainment and rights of future generations and non-human life to be expressed through all strata of governance, not only in law-making, but thermodynamically synchronized at scale. Neither sovereign multilateralism nor multipolarity will develop trust in an all-inclusive body politic to secure this biophysical cohesion. Evolutionary political economy requires constitutional and monetary systems with the capacity to adjust credit within biophysical limits, in which regenerative commons set a floor; public goods of energy-throughput set a ceiling; and sufficiency of property ensures social legitimacy and prevents throughput instability. These are the topics we explore below.
Example Scenario
Imagine a coastal bioregion managing its fisheries, forests and energy use through a shared commons ledger. Local communities track how much the ecosystem can regenerate each year to sustain their population—and moderate their use accordingly. At the same time, planetary institutions monitor ocean health and climate thresholds, ensuring that no region’s activity pushes the planet beyond safe limits. Instead of issuing currency based on debt or growth, each region generates a unit of value anchored in what it can sustainably produce, restore and regenerate—aligning economic activity with the living capacity of Earth.
Aligning Earth Systems through Embodied Sunlight, Planetary Boundaries and Reconciliation
Local, Municipal and Bioregional Communities will be vested by their nations with the power and responsibility of resource sovereignty. In delegating this subsidiarity to the areas where people reside and work, nations will grant their citizens the right to develop the local resources necessary to live within their abilities and surroundings. Archaeology, anthropology and evolutionary science have shown that long before states or markets existed, tribal societies expressed their wellbeing through the smallest-scale organizations capable of governing generative activity through food, water, land, rituals and knowledge. Empowering this was the productive energy of people working together in local and regional environments, where wealth is reciprocal and shared (Redman, 1999). In its indigenous form, a ‘sovereign’ commons expresses the legitimacy of people to participate in mutual agreements for the place-based labor and knowledge that originate in environmental resources, regional habitats and cultural traditions, which are often reinforced by the memory of community survival through agriculture, industry, technology or war. Commons is thus an inherited understanding of a singular area where perception is ecological, and meaning is co-produced through the energy gradients and distributive networks of communities that self-organize within natural, not political, borders (Sundstrom and Allen, 2019). Subjective human experience during the (neo)colonial era, which has uprooted commons governance in most nations, defined cognitive meaning as the interior, mental state of an individual, rather than a person’s relational or collective agency (Delesque, 2026). Yet in all societies, resource democracy continues to motivate local and regional groups in the production of energy resource systems maintained within their ecological capacities (Odum and Odum, 2001, 183-249). Elinor Ostrom described how the collaborative efforts of natural economies continue to follow these historical cooperative principles (Ostrom, 1990).
Tribes, small towns and bioregions remain the ontological basis of this Earth-centric experience, reinvesting resource surpluses in community wellbeing rather than for profit. New forms of decision-making emerge as these subsidiaries of local power incentivize broad partnerships and solidarity among indigenous lands, rural environments, collectives, workplaces and cities (Odum, 2007, 332-379). For decades, translocal and transnational groups have been shaping powerful coalitions of youth and future generations, ecologists, climate justice circles, scientific guilds and digital cooperatives through their similar bioregional identities (Bollier and Helfrich, 2015; Cato, 2013; Ribo, 2012). By anchoring the power of sovereign resources in these areas, commons associations are becoming autonomous yet strategically implanted within larger state and planetary commons structures, sowing within them the incentives for ecological resilience, mutual support and regenerative cooperation (Bauwens, 2023). This reconfigures communities and bioregions into living organs with political power because they are the only agents that habitually observe the constraints of their biocapacity — the bounded conditions of land, matter, energy, ecology and demographics. Bioregional commons are not the first modern movement to recognize that the energy of a place can be governed by the people embedded in that ecological system. Industrial labor did this at an earlier stage of the political economy of energy transformation systems. Just as organized labor reclaimed its embodied metabolic labor power (extracted from production and capital accumulation) through wage shares, the bioregional movement is learning to reclaim the embodied metabolic sunlight (from the production and financialized extraction of ecosystems) through new biophysical shares.
Instead of the core-periphery dynamics that have made communities and bioregions competitors with municipalities for resources in the past, they will partner more closely. For instance, as city planning and policy align with adjacent bioregional commons for watershed management, water-sharing compacts, seed banks, reforestation corridors, migration guidelines and climate resilience buffers, the municipalities will confederate through mutual assemblies, knowledge exchanges and community trading pools (Dolsak and Ostrom, 2003). As their self-governing becomes increasingly horizontal, commons will emerge as the epistemic foundation of the Earth System. Rather than rely on top-down compute from states, thriving communities will measure renewable flows in situ, tracking regeneration rates and seasonal variability, monitoring biocapacity and detecting signals of resource depletion. By assessing the entire scale of solar energy gathered through its successive transformations, the newly-allied urban cores and rural peripheries will regenerate local ecosystems, manage land and water use, preserve biodiversity, operate commons-based provisioning of food, energy and housing, enforce biocapacity indicators and articulate community needs to states and corporations (Odum and Barrett, 2005, 282-508). H.T. Odum proposed that maximum empower is how systems magnify the flow of embodied sunlight through themselves. He called it transformity: the amount of useful embodied sunlight required to produce one unit of energy, material or service (in solar emergy per joule, or sej/J). In Table 1, SE indicates the ratio of cumulative solar energy previously required, directly and indirectly, to generate a useful output – or, energy history / energy now.
| Sector | Account | Transformity Ratio | Ledger Function |
|---|---|---|---|
| (ES × 10ⁿ sej/J) | |||
| Renewable (Commons) | |||
| Sunlight | 3.70 ES | Primary inflow baseline | |
| Wind | 1.50 ES | Renewable inflow | |
| Waves | 1.00 ES | Renewable inflow | |
| Deep geothermal heat | 9.50 ES | Concentrated inflow | |
| Rain & river potential | 5.30 ES | Hydrological work | |
| Tides | 1.10 ES | Astronomical inflow | |
| Semi-Renewable (Commons) | |||
| Forest production | 1.52 ES | Regenerative yield | |
| Groundwater extraction | 1.97 ES | Slow-renewing stock | |
| Agricultural production | 1.07 ES | Managed biosphere | |
| Livestock production | 5.68 ES | Trophic amplification | |
| Fisheries production | 2.43 ES | Marine yield | |
| Non-Renewable (Planetary) | |||
| Mined coal | 2.00 ES | Depletion debit | |
| Crude oil | 2.09 ES | Depletion debit | |
| Crude natural gas | 1.32 ES | Depletion debit | |
| Topsoil loss | 2.15 ES | Irreversible loss | |
| Mined minerals | 6.60 ES | Geological depletion | |
| Processed & Refined (States & Corporations) | |||
| Finished products | 1.44 ES | Manufactured output | |
| Refined fuels | 2.18 ES | Energy carrier | |
| Food & ag. products | 1.61 ES | End-use goods | |
| Livestock, meat & fish | 1.06 ES | Biomass use | |
| Industrial chemicals | 7.81 ES | High synthesis | |
| Refined minerals | 3.34 ES | Material processing | |
| Refined metals | 4.79 ES | Structural materials | |
| Energy & Capital (States & Corporations) | |||
| Electricity | 2.80 ES | Energy service | |
| Hydroelectricity | 2.30 ES | Renewable service | |
| Built infrastructure | 5.20 ES | Long-term capital | |
| Data centers | 5.60 ES | Digital capital | |
| Human & Institutional Energy (States & Corporations) | |||
| Human information processing | 3.16 ES | Cognitive labor | |
| Internet data processing | 1.00 ES | Digital throughput | |
| AI data processing | 4.20 ES | Algorithmic control | |
| Energy in trade | 6.00 ES | Coordination layer | |
| Energy in finance | 7.20 ES | Symbolic control | |
| Energy value of money | 8.40 ES | Generalized claim | |
| Human DNA | 3.16 ES | Evolutionary info | |
Sources: Howard Ostrom, National Emergy Accounting Database, Liu and Yang (2021), and newly calculated data by James Quilligan in bold. ES is the transformity ratio of embodied sunlight, the ’energetic cost in nature’ that expresses how much embodied solar energy is required to generate one joule of useful output. The higher the ES-value, the more embodied sunlight is necessary to produce one unit of that energy, material or service.
The accounting stack reveals the vast scale of accumulated energy work potentials that are available through commons, planetary institutions, and states and corporations. Each energy layer is comprised of embodied sunlight, which is the total amount of solar energy transformed through Earth’s systems, from past and present, that is required to deliver functional outcomes today. The stack demonstrates how embodied sunlight (ES) underlies biocapacity (Earth’s current inflow of ES), wealth (socially organized ES), institutions (socially coordinated mechanisms of ES) and debt (claims on future ES). By integrating thermodynamics, ecology, political economy and local agency in one stroke, the scale of embodied sunlight resolves the vexing problems arising from the deductive rules of inference in extractive supply-demand economics, such as issuing claims against money itself, treating investment as wealth, or externalizing the costs of emissions, biodiversity loss, accumulated heat and intergenerational damages. By equipping bioregional commons funders and self-organizers with the evolutionary scope of the energy available per unit of useful power within their regional systems, bio-communities will be able to generate equity through the energy flows of their exchange networks. Rather than draw upon debt-based assets, currencies and investments that are underpinned by the ‘reserve value’ of climate degradation and energy depletion, commons communities will be able to tap the historical energy memory of the biosphere to evolve adaptive systems for block-level ledgers, commons trusts, bioregional cooperatives and public banks for bioregenerative financing. In so doing, biophysical accounting will also provide a basis for claims of real-world ontology by bioregions and municipalities, validating their rights to political subsidiarity from nation-states.
Commons networks are already burgeoning in numerous town and pastoral settings, attracting new generations of co-workers (Bollier and Helfrich, 2019; Brewer, 2023; Dolsak and Ostrom, 2003). Cross-boundary collaboration is also spreading among many ecological and cultural basins such as the Amazon, Andes, Alps, Normandy and Sahel. In translocal places like these, bioregional assemblies, comprised of residents, indigenous stewards, mutual aid networks, cooperatives, community planners, local governments and scientists, are busily expanding. With newly-found subsidiarity from their states, the varied watershed councils, regional land trusts and regenerative farms will gain political authority to administer local land use, water rights and cultural norms through their energy budgets, using deliberative processes such as Web4 or open source governance (no black market chips) to track the stocks and flows of embodied sunlight within their local or regional commons (Odum, 1996; Ostrom, 1990). Through these accounting data, currency issuance rules and audit trails, a reserve value could be created to undergird redeemable vouchers in the collective exchange pools of thousands of bioregional communities (Snell, 2026). These commons monetary systems may eventually lead to a biosocial compact, nesting the sustainable currencies of bioregions/municipalities within the planetary commons.
Planetary Institutions will be commissioned by sovereign states to set planetary limits and facilitate fair access to shared resources for cross-border protection. This involves designating climate, oceans, atmosphere, biodiversity, soil, water, polar regions, planetary data and peacekeeping as public goods. Public welfare has always focused on maintaining shared resources to sustain human needs through equitable governance and resilience. The ancient idea of welfare developed when agricultural surplus led to the consolidation of governance in small units, allowing public welfare to be coordinated through societal interactions beyond local or regional kinship. Nation-states later evolved to manage these essential goods in the public interest, including irrigation, defense, famine prevention and infrastructure like roads and bridges. Unifying the Earth Systems as public goods was the aim of the UN-based Common Heritage of Mankind in the 1960s-70s, which attempted to develop a global trust of public goods for future generations. These institutions were weakened by state power and geopolitics because modern law, money, trade and debt were regarded as autonomous realities, disconnected from the common good. But public goods may now be realigned through the binding responsibilities of safeguarding the planetary boundaries and upholding the public welfare through the provisioning of energy, medicine and intelligence worldwide (Kaul, 2003; Ord, 2020, 121-216). While commons remain the local and regional anchors of cooperation, planetary stewards will manage planetary-scale risks, monitor biospheric health and wellbeing, coordinate emergency responses and authorize public goods based on the usable energy that society has available, the quality of that energy and whether its use can be sustained over time (Odum and Odum, 2001, 133-170). Rather than a world government that commands extraction or allocates resources directly, planetary stewards will serve as a counterbalance to state sovereignty through the revaluation of cross-border areas. The skills and expertise of citizens, indigenous representatives, regional commons workers and Earth System researchers may qualify them to work in these institutions, along with scientific experts from various transnational and accountable bodies. They would be elected into these positions by local and regional publics to set ecological constraints, protect transborder commons for health and safety, and act as cross-scale auditors for climate stability, biodiversity security, ocean integrity, atmospheric commons, planetary data and monitoring systems (Richardson et al, 2023; Rockström et al, 2025). To embark on all this, there may be three unique departments:
- Planetary Commons Assembly (PCA) — created alongside the UN General Assembly to measure, set limits and trigger corrective action as biophysical thresholds are breached
- UN Trusteeship Council (UNTC) — reestablished to guarantee equal decision-making on the security and provisioning of biophysical resources for Earth’s population
- UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC) — transformed into a board of accounting standards, providing input to bioregions and municipalities that act as trustees of planetary boundaries, and to states and corporations as their auditing authority
Citizen conventions that deliberate on biospheric issues may submit binding recommendations to these bodies (Archibugi, 2008). Evidence-based reports may also be received from translocal assemblies, consisting of delegates from bioregions, youth and future generations, indigenous representatives, transnational civic movements and scientific agencies. Experienced in ecological accounting for climate, forest, soil, water and ocean systems, commons groups may develop digital governance hubs or Designated Operational Areas to manage the resources of their particular using satellite or Web4 tools. Similar technology may be used to track Earth System health, community resilience and biophysical energy flows. None of these methods for bio-accounting are valued in money but in the metrics of biocapacity, including regenerative surplus, restoration reserves and intergenerational equity. In Table 2, the regenerative measures of net energy and surplus appear in the first group, highlighting that societies cannot function without energy remaining after production costs. Below this are the restoration metrics of energy quality and transformation, expressing how ecological work is converted into higher-order activities and why not all energy is interchangeable. Last on this energetic scale are the intergenerational measures of sustainable yield, renewability, carrying capacity and overshoot, defining the non-negotiable ecological limits within which all economic activity must operate in the future.
| Metric | Formula | Biophysical Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| (in sej/J of stocks and flows) | ||
| Energy Return on Energy Invested | Energy Output / Energy Input | Surplus-generating capacity of an energy system; determines whether complex social functions can be supported |
| Net Energy Gain | Energy Output − Energy Input | Absolute surplus energy available to society after production costs |
| Net Energy Ratio | Energy Output / Energy Input | Viability threshold for maintaining complex infrastructure and institutions |
| Energy Surplus Fraction | Net Energy Gain / Total Energy Output | Share of total energy remaining for social use after production |
| Transformity | Embodied Sunlight (seJ) / Usable Energy (J) | Energy quality and hierarchical complexity of outputs |
| ES Yield Ratio | Total Embodied Sunlight / Purchased ES Inputs | Degree to which systems amplify free ecological work |
| Resource Depletion Time | Resource Stock / Annual Extraction Rate | Amount of time a resource lasts at current use |
| Renewability Ratio | Annual Regeneration / Annual Consumption | Level at which resource use is regenerative, steady-state, or depletive |
| Carrying Capacity | Sustainable Yield / Population Needs | Maximum long-term scale supportable by ecosystems |
| Overshoot Ratio | Actual Throughput / Sustainable Yield | Degree to which systems exceed ecological limits |
| Ecological Load Factor | Human Demand / Biocapacity | Pressure placed on ecosystems by human activity |
| Fiat Energy Intensity | Total Energy Use / GDP | Physical energy dependence of economic output |
A further use of biophysical metrics is to bring the BRICS, G20 and G7 nations together with small states for deliberations on Earth’s ecological infrastructure. As the atmosphere, soil, water, plastics, biodiversity and ecological limits become trusteeships for governance, alongside peace and safety, this council would examine a hard ceiling for growth increase, institutional expansion and currency issuance. They would start by examining biocapacity resilience as a window on planetary security, including mutual climate accounting, biodiversity credits, planetary adaptation funds and regulation of AI. Potentially evolving into a negotiating entity, the BRICS/G20/G7 council may provide input to PCA, UNC and UNFCC on the planet’s resource thresholds and its energy security across bioregions, using the biocapacity accounting stacks and their real-time compute (Tables 1 and 2). In the meantime, the IMF, World Bank and other banking, accounting and financial institutions, would also ground their biocapacity metrics in the rate at which embodied sunlight is mobilized, transformed and reinvested for the adaptive throughput of ecosystems (Cohen, 1995, 161-364; Gilman, 2025; Odum, 2007, 209-220). Rather than a single currency maintained by the hegemonic reserves of a US or China, these actions may lead to negotiations for a monetary system based on the biopower rate of Earth’s resources in sej/J (Liu and Yang, 2021; Quilligan, 2024, 12-13), as explained in the following sections.
Nation-States and Corporations will have core roles in this interdependent system, particularly as the world recognizes that the foundations of modern societies — the 17th century institution of sovereign governments and 19th-20th century models of economic growth — have outlasted their missions, making the management of resource commons especially inefficient at local/regional and planetary levels. Climate warming, atmospheric carbon, ocean acidification, soil degradation, biodiversity loss and pandemics are challenging nations and corporations to slow their use of world resource supplies for wealth accumulation. As AI and robotics reduce the labor-energy value of humans, those states and corporations will be forced to accept new measures for income equality and purchasing capacity to sustain people’s needs. While planetary institutions are setting non-negotiable biophysical limits through public goods, their obligations will not involve revenue generation or distributive politics. The responsibility for fiscal policy and wealth distribution remains with the State/Corporate sector, as each of them evolves into a mechanism for managing the accessibility and acquisition of goods and services in the economy. The functions of nation-states and corporations will become further intertwined because, in practice, they have already been operating as a co-evolving, top-down power complex under globalization: both issue and allocate claims on resources, enforce property rights, mobilize capital and externalize ecological costs using the same fiscal, legal and financial instruments. The growing risk of resource depletion will now oblige sovereign states to reduce their high-entropy monetary debt, and corporations to reduce their fossil fuel extraction, requiring both to allocate and disseminate resources based on thermodynamic limits.
By vesting the sovereign power of ecological governance into local communities, municipalities, bioregions and planetary institutions as part of a biosocial compact, the former mandates and functions of government and business will be reconceived (Keohane and Ostrom, 1995). An agreement on planetary equality, cooperation and sustainability, grounded in the science of bioregional/planetary biocapacity and regenerative fiscal policies, will make states and corporations functionally interoperable with local economies, municipal planning and regional cooperation. This has far-reaching implications for the next monetary system. The transformed states and corporations, operating as utilities for resource distribution, will be legally bound to the planetary protocols for bioregional accountability. Just as planetary institutions are responsible for measuring ecological ceilings, the functions of states and corporations will be aligned with Earth’s biophysical assets and liabilities to coordinate infrastructure, technology, finance, ecosystem and social needs. Hence, the economic data that national decision-makers use will be sourced and accounted much differently. Instead of valuing currency based on market speculation or the reserve backing of fiat notes, a currency’s value will express the surplus embodied sunlight that is invested in the sustainment of life and civilization, including the real cost of energy, materials and ecological services that support economic production and consumption. Rather than debt-based metrics drawn from within national or sub-national political boundaries, value-creation in state policies and corporate activities is now derived from the bioregional/planetary stocks and flows of energy across the biocapacity thresholds of population self-sufficiency and resilience (Cohen, 1995, 161-355; Odum and Odum, 2001, 171-193). Thus, as the planetary monetary system itself becomes a ledger for embodied sunlight, money is linked directly to the physical resources and energy that drive economic activity. Table 3 converts the accounting stack of Table 1 into a compressed ledger for the: (1) assets of renewable energy entitlements, infrastructure capacity and knowledge commons; (2) liabilities for maintenance of energy obligations, repair and ecosystem damage, debt management, externalization of pollution and biodiversity loss, and restoration/depletion obligations; and (3) reconciliation of assets and liabilities through settlement, currency issuance, fiscal allocation and dissemination of goods and services.
(ES × 10ⁿ sej/J)
- Renewable Commons Inflows
Sunlight · Wind · Waves · Tides · Rain · Geothermal
(1.00ES – 9.50ES) - Semi-Renewable Regenerative Stocks
Forests · Agriculture · Fisheries · Groundwater
(1.07ES – 5.68ES) - Non-Renewable Endowment
Coal · Oil · Gas · Minerals · Topsoil loss
(1.32ES – 6.60ES) - Embedded Capital Stock
Electricity systems · Hydropower · Built infrastructure
(2.30ES – 5.20ES)
- Consumption Drawdown
Food · Goods · Fuels · Electricity services
(1.06ES – 2.18ES) - Depletion Debt
Irreversible extraction of non-renewables
(2.00ES – 6.60ES) - Maintenance Obligations
Grid upkeep · Infrastructure repair · System losses
(2.80ES – 5.20ES) - Restoration & Regeneration Liabilities
Ecosystem repair · Soil rebuilding · Water recharge
(≥ regenerative ES)
- Human & AI Information Processing (3.16ES – 4.20ES)
- Trade Coordination (6.00ES)
- Financial Representation (7.20ES)
- EcoMoney — Revaluation Claims (8.40ES)
Prologue for a Future Order: Campaign and Negotiations for a Planetary Monetary System
This sketch of global reintegration is hardly conclusive. It is intended to spark a dialogue for Earth System accountability based on the premise that interdependence is not about who controls a system, but the story that the system uses to shape its governance. For example, the colonialists’ extractive myths of debt creation, rentier finance, carbon-intensive growth, ecological depletion and intergenerational transfer of wealth have forced global society to grow faster than its capacity to repay the ecological interest — imbalances that financial systems continue to mask by rolling their debt forward, externalizing costs and discounting the future. The (neo)colonial narrative is still that private ownership uses extractive economic logic to award sovereignty to nations and valuation-power to markets, leaving public goods underfunded and commons unprotected. Yet the imminent narrative is to let biophysics decide what counts for our planetary domains in the settlement of claims on Earth’s biocapacity. A new order calls for the continued viability of complex human societies under biophysical constraint – not world government, but a cooperative balance in our civic responsibilities for measuring planetary realities, naming their liabilities and reconciling them.
Planetary negotiations would begin with discussions on the governance of Earth at 1.5 °C. This figure refers to the increase in global mean surface temperature relative to pre-industrial levels (1850–1900) and the estimated median of ~937 zettajoules in the IPC’s Assessment Report 6 (1971-2018). Simply put, the 1.5 °C of excess heat is cumulative evidence that exteriorized sunlight has been drawn down faster than Earth’s systems of embodied sunlight can dissipate and regenerate. While the UNFCC has focused largely on emission flows in the atmosphere, the climate crisis is also a problem of stocks: the heat already stored within the planet’s surface. By 2050, Earth will have locked in long-lasting ocean heat, irreversible ice-loss trajectories, decades of sea-level rise and frequent extreme events as the new normal. In Odum’s terms, humanity will exceed the system’s maximum-power equilibrium, forcing Earth toward higher entropy production and lower efficiency in embodied sunlight. Thus, the 1.5°C threshold for Earth temperature may be reframed as a proxy of ~900 ZJ in accumulated planetary heat, since this directly represents the energy imbalances baked into the planet. Because this conglomerated planetary heat is an unpaid depletion debt, it may be used as the starting point in qualifying how much surplus power, measurement and enforcement can be distributed across the planet. This is why the pre-2050 window is an unparalleled moment in history: it is the last period in which coordinated planetary governance can prevent today’s climate liabilities from becoming far more costly, unequal and uncontrollably violent for future generations.
Table 4 distinguishes Assets measured by municipalities and newly-organized bioregions as verified biophysical capacity; Liabilities measured by new planetary institutions as cumulative claims and systemic risk; and Reconciliation carried out by states and corporations through enforceable policies, investments and restoration commitments needed to resolve the biocapacity gap. This accounting will change the operating rules in global finance, trade and development, opening the way to a system of planetary currency based on preventing the heat stored in the planet from rising above ~900 ZJ, the maximum tolerable imbalance between the needs of living populations for embodied sunlight and Earth’s limited capacity to dissipate heat. Through this accountable infrastructure, climate risk will be measurable, auditable and enforceable across all borders, giving the monetary system a sustainable foundation. As the currency aligns with the stigmergent feedback loops between ecosystems and institutions in the planetary commons, EcoMoney will revalue itself between the availability and use of embodied sunlight without the coercion of centralized planning,
(EcoMoney Issuance at ~900 ZJ Constraint)
| Category | Core Components | Relation to ~900 ZJ Limit |
|---|---|---|
| Renewable Commons Inflows | Sunlight · Wind · Waves · Tides · Rain · Geothermal | Do not add to cumulative planetary heat; define sustainable annual throughput |
| Semi-Renewable Regenerative Stocks | Forests · Agriculture · Fisheries · Groundwater | Offset or worsen heat burden depending on regeneration rate |
| Non-Renewable Endowment | Coal · Oil · Gas · Minerals · Topsoil loss | Directly increase cumulative heat burden, measured as depletion debt |
| Embedded Capital Stock | Electricity systems · Hydropower · Built infrastructure | Historical contribution to heat burden; future value is climate-contingent |
| Category | Core Components | Relation to ~900 ZJ Limit |
|---|---|---|
| Consumption Drawdown | Food · Goods · Fuels · Electricity services | Adds to or relieves heat burden depending on energy source |
| Depletion Debt | Irreversible extraction of fossil fuels and materials | Cumulative contributor to ~900 ZJ planetary heat stock |
| Maintenance Obligations | Grid upkeep · Infrastructure repair · System losses | Rising share of throughput as heat stress increases |
| Restoration & Regeneration Liabilities | Ecosystem repair · Soil rebuilding · Water recharge | Required to stabilize or reverse heat accumulation |
| Condition | Definition |
|---|---|
| 1.5 °C (~900 ZJ) | Maximum tolerable cumulative imbalance between human energy use and Earth’s capacity to dissipate heat |
| Sustainable Value | Exists when assets can service liabilities without increasing cumulative planetary heat and entropy |
| EcoMoney Issuance | Verifies that limits to biocapacity do not increase net heat accumulation and are biophysically solvent with stable liquidity and purchasing capacity |
Moral and social precursors of biophysical accounting, such as Catholic indulgences, Islamic zekat and Weimar-era demurrage, recognized how imbalanced actions incur debts that require reconciliation through energy circulation (Le Goff, 1984; Lietaer, 2012; Sahafi, 2026). But modernity has had great difficulty in merging two realities: how life organizes itself through biology and how different laws govern physics. What is missing is the chemistry to bond them, revealing the ecological limits as biological and demystifying embodied sunlight as physics. This calls for a public education campaign that draws from deep human roots in physical and mental health, social harmony, and moral and economic prosperity (Bregman, 2019; Hall and Klitgaard, 2018, 323-423; Quilligan, 2024, 13-14; Stiegler, 2015, 152-220). A few etymological principles rooted in Eastern and Western history may be reintroduced, offering the public a familiar grammar that makes these terms recognizable. Weal is derived from an Indo-Germanic root, meaning “to wish or will”. It survives in Old English words like the 14th century commonweal and expressions like wellbeing, welfare and wealth dating back to the 12th century (Clark Hall, 1894). Regionally, these were complementary ideas until the colonial era completely ignored wellbeing, disparaged welfare and overemphasized wealth; but a critique is only as good as its solutions. Table 5 is an outline for a public education campaign that focuses on the wellbeing of local and regional commons through renewable flows, the welfare of public goods through regenerative planetary stocks, and the built and processed wealth of states and corporations. By reapplying these terms to the planetary commons, public groups will learn how weal may be reinterpreted through the real work potential embodied in resources to sustain biophysical needs. These terms, reinvigorated by the possibilities of Earth law and biophysical sources of value, may provide a gateway for an advocacy network of activists, educators and policymakers to hold discussions through the media, world conferences and political summits on weal incentives for a biosocial contract on the planetary commons (Fullbrook, 2016; Hall, 2010, 3-110; Hausman, 2008; Ostrom, 1990). Bringing this to bioregional groups, NGOs, universities, development banks and climate finance meetings will make the goal more comprehensible and actionable. This campaign for a biosocial compact would be held through 2050.
| Planetary Ledger | Mode of Governance | Earth Resources | Resource System |
|---|---|---|---|
| Common Wellbeing Energy AssetsLocal, Municipal and Bioregional Communities |
Practice resource democracy, labor rights, ecosystem management, cultural heritage, collective livelihoods | Food, water, energy, indigenous lands, population needs |
Commons
Resource regeneration, sharing, customary rights, cultural continuity, mutual aid |
| Public Welfare Ecological LimitsPlanetary Institutions |
Set planetary boundaries and steward human and interspecies resources | Energy, biosphere, atmosphere, oceans, climate, water, soil, food |
Public Goods
Intergenerational / transnational offices for biosphere, climate, polar icecaps, seas, chemicals, pandemics |
| Private Wealth ReconciliationStates and Corporations |
Settlement, allocation and dissemination of resources within and across state borders | National resources, labor, infrastructure, biophysical value, wealth redistribution |
State / Private Ownership
Law, contracts, trade, |
The objective is to define biophysical accountability in terms of common wellbeing, public welfare and private wealth in ways that conform within Earth’s metabolic capacity. But this is impossible without a new system of value. As noted, the 1.5 °C rise in temperature is roughly equivalent to an energy-throughput level of ~900 ZJ of the extra heat stored in oceans, atmosphere, soils and ice. Recasting this in a planetary energy budget would create a fixed exchange rate, analogous to the gold standard. As the value of EcoMoney becomes a settlement between common wellbeing (in energy assets) and public welfare (in ecological liabilities), the world’s wealth standard (in currency exchange) is no longer pegged to fiat money or gold. EcoMoney then represents a claim on a unit of embodied sunlight, a biophysical filter that all currencies must clear against the remaining safe operating space below the threshold of 1.5 °C temperature (~900 ZJ). By internalizing this power-throughput limit of ecology and aligning the long-term sustainability of commons with the economic activity of the present, the issuance of currency will be anchored to the biocapacity of Earth.
Meanwhile, bioregional organizers and campaigners must be trained to apply their biocapacity ledgers in places where embodied sunlight is stewarded and measured, such as watersheds, regional food-energy systems, urban bioregions, coastal ecosystems and island states. The goal by 2045 is to train and inspire at least 500 bioregional ledger systems to attain low volatility, high-provisioning security and no-growth resilience in measures such as transborder restoration, food security buffers, water security, climate adaptation labor and population stability. By 2050, planetary negotiators will decide if these bioregional pilots have generated climate finance balances, reshaped development lending and sustainably supported human needs and activity in these places. If they conclude that the ledgers have enabled bioregional trusts to maintain net-positive energy flows by adhering to planetary ceilings, maintaining regenerative capacity and rewarding sufficiency in their commons, the negotiators may then decide that the energy of state and corporate resources, formerly extracted from the planet’s ecosystems, must be vested through subsidiarity back into the commons. They would insist that the security behind these responsibilities is not to separate commons, public goods or private property any longer, but to re-synchronize them through the planetary commonweal. The ledger of Table 4 may then be introduced into existing trade talks, biodiversity treaties and climate adaption funding, leading to the development of a biosocial compact for the planetary commons.
Figure 2.
Our planet faces vital claims on future embodied sunlight. By 2050, as world population reaches 10 billion, there may be depression or war for the resources that remain. Better that nations decentralize their sovereign power before Earth’s complex life-support systems collapse, the energy-debt of society defaults, and people without water, bread or eggs take to the streets to resist the rationing that befalls them. Is there hope for a biosocial compact on the planetary commons (Figure 2)? Civil unrest is quickening the need for safe and just spaces for human and non-human lives, and the bioregional roots to support them (Solnit, 2010; Machado de Oliveria, 2021). With the adoption of sustainable governance for the world’s commons, civilization may yet maintain a stable population. But the odds are long and time is short. Soil, energy, water, climate, governance and economic systems will converge peaceably only so long as biophysical surpluses for living beings still exist.
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