The EU Green Deal Resistance

Web3 for Climate, Security, Society, Trade and Trump

They saw it coming—the U.S. tariff blustering, Ukraine betrayals, green tech reversals, magical thinking, personalization of power, and a second exit from the Paris Climate Accords. Less predictable is how Trumpists now argue that a multipolar world requires colonialism-with-friends, abandonment of the Global South, constitutional crisis, and autocratic breakthrough at home. If Conway's Law predicts societies mirror prevailing technology, then the U.S. is approaching peak centralization—of power, data, and governance. Yet centralization benefits only Big Tech. Paradoxically, peak centralization accelerates the rise of a decentralized Web3 Internet. I argue decentralization's spear and shield are coming into view.

While the US concentrates corporate power, denies climate change, menaces friends and trashes the rules-based order, the EU's 2020 Green Deal unfolds as strategic genius. The Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (ESPR) uses the scale required for climate action to integrate decentralized technologies throughout the economy. Integrating Web3 into trade realigns national interests, strengthens strategic autonomy, drives industrial renewal, lessens the wealth gap, advances circular economies, and lowers populist rage. Put simply, the US is leaning into neoliberalism, while the EU reaches for tech-driven populism—and builds resistance to Trump 2.0.

The EU's Pivot

In 2020, the EU rewrote its laws to disrupt the origins of climate change, environmental degradation, and rising populism. Rather than continuing to treat symptoms, the EU uproots causation by prioritizing prevention over cleanup and using technology to embed policy (and democracy) throughout the economy. I predict we'll consider 2025 the year the EU Green Deal moved away from zero-sum rewards toward a "We Economy" that works for more people. In 2024 public opinion polls, seven in ten EU citizens backed their energy transition. Around 43% want the transition to go faster.

I argue the EU Green Deal is a meta-solution that can overcome Big Tech's advantages, renew civic life, and restore a real shot at opportunity, health, and a better future for families. Using circularity to build strategic autonomy makes Europe a lot more agnostic about whatever the US and China do. It's also the only national policy with the scale to check future Category 5 hurricanes, mega-fires, rising authoritarianism, trade imbalances—and hegemon exits.

The Plan

In 2025, the EU activates the Green Deal strategy of "growth without consumption." Their first moves are legal and policy shifts contained in the ESPR. The ESPR builds new ways to measure supply chain trade's economic activity and environmental impact via an innovation called Digital Product Passports (DPPs), which trace products from raw materials to recycling bins. The second project introduces Web3 technology that reaches for legal and policy goals with blockchain-style DPP networks that collect rivers of new climate and trade data. The third catalyzes a cultural change by restoring basic bargaining power to the little guy. Together, these create market-based solutions to previously unfixable problems.

Policy & Measurement

Over 30% of global GDP comes from countries that require some level of supply chain tracing—a figure set to grow even as the US backpedals on these requirements or the EU Simplification Agenda is a volte-face. The ESPR is global sustainability's 800-pound gorilla because it is a unified framework for circularity, sovereignty, trade, and equity, (and the most comprehensive large-market legislation). The ESPR creates the conditions for circularity and builds a digital wall around EU consumers. At core, DPPs track supply chains, prove production methods and environmental impact. Regardless of where raw materials, components, or finished products come from, most products require DPPs to access EU customers.

Circularity requires redesigning products, building digital supply chain infrastructure, and ensuring robust data systems that plan for the end at the beginning. A major barrier to circular adoption is the loss of product information after the first sale. Keeping product information accessible on public blockchains unlocks the economic value of both raw and recaptured materials by enabling ongoing repair, reuse, and recycling. These records store essential data about materials, problematic inputs, repair instructions, and end-of-life requirements. This foundation allows industries to shift away from the traditional linear "take, make, waste" model and transition to circular systems.

Why do it?

Circularity transforms economies by keeping materials in use—weakening resource monopolies, reducing raw material costs, minimizing waste, and creating high-value jobs. Decoupling prosperity from raw material imports and embedding supply chain tracing challenges the economic foundations of authoritarianism and creates economies that resist manipulation, cronyism, and centralized control. Circularity also fulfills consumer demands for better products and practices while uncovering untapped opportunities for innovation, efficiency, and resilience

Web3 and Digital Public Goods

Blockchain networks are evolving beyond NFTs, token drops, and crypto casinos into real-world, open-source public infrastructure. The United Nations Development Programme writes: "We must undertake a concerted global effort to encourage and invest in the creation of Digital Public Goods."

Digital Public Goods (DPGs) are designed to counter Big Tech's surveillance capitalism and lessen the digital divide, which makes them night-and-day different from memecoin casinos. These open, distributed networks work quietly—on climate action, circularity, public services, and governance—while restoring rights, freedoms, responsibilities, and trust pirated by Big Tech. They can make promises around people, data, money, and services—like owning our personal data so it cannot be weaponized against us.

Digital Public Goods are frontier technologies, but they're happening now. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation's Mojaloop project shows the power of a shared global brain. By collapsing costs and scaling access, Mojaloop provides banking services to a billion people who make about two dollars a day. Estonia's X-Road transparently powers public administration. If Web2 was about communication, Web3 is about computation and transformation. The Web3 vision: AI will make top expertise nearly free. DPGs make top computing power almost free. Available to everyone. Owned by no one.

Embedding climate, circularity, and societal goals into economic systems aligns incentives with long-term sustainability. By coding populist priorities like fairness, trust, transparency, and accountability into life online, these tools automate oversight, reduce dependence on traditional institutions, and enable collaboration without surrendering autonomy, control, or consent. Over time, digitization and automation fundamentally redefine governance and market dynamics. DPPs will become the builders, police, accountants, librarians, and trade negotiators of Green Deal success.

The ESPR demonstrates how distributed networks drive systemic transformation. By embedding community and individual rights at supply chain touchpoints, decentralization redistributes power, control, and money to a network's edges. Creators everywhere will have more market voice. When supply chain tracing scales across blockchain networks, sustainability data transforms fragmented interests into a third force—a unified framework for economic, environmental, and social renewal. Collectively, these changes empower small players to negotiate based on their contributions rather than their market position.

Culture and Bargaining Power

John Maynard Keynes argued that economic instability— recently effloresced by a pandemic, war, high inflation, stagnant wages, and rising immigration—creates uncertainty, deepens inequality, and limits the capacity to thrive. Web3 blockchain networks counter Big Tech's centralized power by embedding rights, freedoms, responsibilities, and trust into daily transactions. In Michael Porter's terms, restored rights strengthen the bargaining power of those at the bottom. Soon, everyone in a transaction can agitate for a fair deal. Small changes at the bottom ripple through trade relationships to neutralize legacy advantages, transform markets, and drive systemic change toward healthier, freer, fairer capitalism. It is inevitable that these new Web3-supplied rights will change culture.

The Secret Sauce

Bargaining power is the secret sauce to creating systemic change, ameliorating malaise-fueled populism and reversing neoliberal mistakes. Empowering individuals to bargain for their interests aligns democratic priorities—trade, defense, security, and free markets—with well-being and fairness. Bargaining power is how the economy starts working for the people who create value rather than only those who control it. Decentralization = #Resistance. It also equals progress.