Carbon-Trading: Too Much For the Human Mind?

Further to my assertion of neutrality with regards to the neutralisation of greenhouse gases through carbon trading:

If I have a reservation it's that carbon-trading will be a further abstraction of money and of the economy. I believe that the more abstracted the economy, the more we humans are afflicted by material greed.

The simplest economy was when a commodity was itself: water as water, food as food, shelter as shelter etc.

As economy and trade complicated, money became a convenient token. The first coins were developed by Lydian king Croesus (pictured), around 560 BC.

Coins were used an abstracted representation of what could be bought. So the coin was - and is - the abstraction of food, water, and shelter and whatever else can be bought.

As we progress even further into the digital age, coins themselves become abstracted into electronic representations of themselves. A double abstraction, if you like. And so we are taken another step further away from whatever it is the monetary value represents.

I believe that these continual abstractions of economy have made humans avaricious because they lose sight of what these abstractions represent: This money in my hand could represent the food which is essential for my survival, but it could also represent all the soulless, needless trinkets, baubles and bangles that the commercials are seducing me with.

My faculty to barter for what is essential for my existence (food, water, shelter) can, by way of money, be subverted into a desire for non-essentials. The human quest for some non-essentials is one of the biggest wastes of productivity and endeavour.

So, I am cautious about abstracting concern for the environment into a carbon-credit which is the abstraction of electronic money which is the abstraction of paper and metal money which is an abstraction of the thing itself.

Not because carbon-trading is a bad or good idea as yet - the evidence being in the dessert - but because I'm not sure the human mind can successfully compute abstraction upon abstraction without usurping its own nature.