The Unauditable Market

On what the carbon market is actually trading, why it is never going to work, and what the measurement of living systems requires to be real. The argument runs from Goldsmiths' Hall in London — where assayers have verified metal purity for over seven centuries — to a single principle: markets in valuable things do not work unless an independent party, with no stake in the outcome, performs the measurement. That principle is what the voluntary carbon market does not have, and what an Ecological Condition Index can.