By Amy Larkin and Siddhartha Velandy

This post was originally published on the Huffington Post on January 10th, 2014 and co-authored by Siddhartha Velandy, a Major in United States Marine Corps Reserve and author of The Green Arms Race: Reorienting the Discussion on Climate Change, Energy Policy, and National Security, 3 HARV. NAT’L SEC. J. 309 (2012). The views expressed here are his own.

It’s official. Climate change has opened a new frontier. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel recently announced the Pentagon’s first ever “Arctic Strategy,” which is designed to protect American security interests as rising global temperatures melt polar ice. He noted that climate change is “transforming what was a frozen desert into an evolving navigable ocean.” This increased access will heighten tensions in the region as nations compete for newly-accessible natural resources and trade routes.

We are creatures from different ends of our nation’s cultural spectrum — one from the military and one from Greenpeace. Even so, we share a vision for the United States in order to safeguard our environment and best provide for the future security of the nation. We call it Mutually Assured Survival, and we are encouraged that Secretary Hagel asserts his intention to address the long term in his short-term Pentagon decision-making. But he did not mention the most important piece of a long-term strategy — the R&D funding necessary to eliminate American dependence on oil — not just fossil fuels from foreign sources. This will prevent the need to engage in conflict in the Arctic (and elsewhere) as well as help prevent runaway climate chaos.

Responding to this threat requires decisive action and consistent funding. Melting ice caps and the corresponding rise in sea levels will increase global

Amy’s column “How West’s throwaway culture destroys basic freedoms in China” was listed as one of the Top 5 social impact stories of 2013 by the Guardian Sustainable Business.

See all of Amy’s contributions to the Guardian here.

First published in the Guardian, December 19, 2013.

My years of work as a radical environmentalist in concert with multinational business has inspired me to believe that we can change our mindset from “Why don’t they?” to “Why don’t we?” So many engineers and executives demonstrate courage, tenacity and creativity when faced with regulation or resource constraint in the pipeline.

Real opportunities for transformative change lie in preparing for crises. The National Academy of Science’s new report, Abrupt Impacts of Climate Change, states:

“To willfully ignore the threat of abrupt change could lead to more costs, loss of life, suffering, and environmental degradation … The time is here to be serious about the threat of tipping points so as to better anticipate and prepare ourselves for the inevitable surprises.”

Before Hurricane Sandy hit the US’s north-east in 2012, scientists and meteorologists warned of a likely devastating weather event on the eastern seaboard at some point. By day one after the storm, it was clear that we would spend more than $100bn on recovery. You didn’t need an expert to imagine the financial devastation. But you did need serious analyses and one helluva backbone to make smart, tough decisions on infrastructure, relocation and rebuilding.

So taxpayers (federal, regional and local), businesses and families spent this huge sum of money, and we will likely have to spend it all over again in the near future. These difficult expenditures were almost obligatory despite strong leadership from local governors and mayors. We were simply not prepared for this predictable event. We do not have our transition agenda in place.

We are already between a rock and a hard place and we have no Plan B. We must now have

First posted in the Guardian, December 6th, 2013

As an environmentalist, producer and businesswoman, I have always thought that moving anyone to action takes either power (or money) or love (or sex). Sometimes it takes all two (or four).

In a revelatory few weeks of theater, many of my assumptions about power and money were sent packing. I saw a biting and brilliant all-woman production of Julius Caesar, Shakespeare’s ultimate power play. And I also caught a hysterically funny production (not Book of Mormon funny but uproarious nonetheless) of the Twelfth Night, Shakespeare’s funniest romantic comedy.

Hmm, the women got inside the very male power struggles of the Roman Empire (set in a modern prison) and the men were clearly as bewitched, bothered and bewildered as the most foolish of archetypal maidens. This is a new world of cross-gender understanding, and a very welcome one.

Now if women can also get hold of the money part of the equation that runs the world, we’d really have some social evolution going on. Therein lies the rub. We women are gaining power in many ways, but still, in the realm of the real power and money tables (corporate boards, CEOs and senior management, cabinet ministers and entrepreneurs of high-impact businesses), we disrupt the economic order less than we could.

And the world certainly needs disruption, both to alleviate the great environmental burden we are placing on the planet and our children and also to remedy the terrible income inequality that threatens every nation’s social fabric.

Here are some depressing statistics. Women who work full-time currently earn 77 cents on the dollar in the United States, a statistic that has remained static for 10 years. This pay gap exists in nearly every occupation,

First posted on the 2degreesNetwork on November 28th, 2013. 

The laws of nature and the rules of business are currently in direct collision. Today, the biggest polluter makes the biggest profit. Short-term earnings govern financial analysts’ worldview, and a company that spends smart dollars for a healthy return within five years — both in profits as well as savings in energy, waste and water — well, that just doesn’t cut it with Wall Street. Short-term earnings trump long-term value. Therein lies the rub.

To counter this, confoundingly complex integrated reporting and natural capital accounting efforts are being led by both the giants and upstarts of the financial service industry, myriad trade associations and civil society organizations as well as the World Bank. But some of this work has already reached the shore.

Puma was the first company to create an Environmental Profit & Loss Statement (EP&L) that measured and accounted for both its 2010 profits as well as the company’s toll on the environment. This statement showed that Puma’s environmental costs would have eaten 72% of its annual profit, €145 million. Adding to its astonishing transparency, Puma convened experts across the spectrum to review and improve its EP&L methodology. Although the EP&L, with the aid of both PricewaterhouseCoopers and TruCost, went four levels down the supply chain, this new accounting is an imperfect science.

But all accounting is imperfect. One day your coal assets look hardy on your books, and the next year they look like stranded assets. As I note in my book, Environmental Debt: The Hidden Costs of a Changing Global Economy, “Ratan Tata recently admitted that the energy from his company’s new massive coal power plant in India will bring energy to market at roughly the same price

First published in the Huffington Post, October 8th, 2013

I just finished reading a fantastic novel, The Carbon Diaries, by Saci Lloyd (2010). It has tons of music and sex, so of course it’s riveting, but its main theme is climate change. It is the imagined diary of a 16-year-old London girl living through the carbon rationing following the Great Storm of 2015. The U.K. is the first to have this rationing as there is finally an understanding that a radical decrease in greenhouse gas emissions is URGENT. The rest of Europe and the world are watching intently as the U.K. goes through its paces and eventually moves to water rationing as well.

I was reading the book during the actual Great Floods of 2013 in Colorado and Mexico. In fact, had I read this book anytime during 2013, I would have had the backdrop of millennia-old glaciers spewing water from beneath their surfaces, droughts followed by floods followed by droughts, all at levels not seen in hundreds of years (or ever). These 2013 weather events will cost hundreds of billions of dollars now and in the future for public agencies, private businesses and individuals. This money increases our debt and limits our financial ability to protect national parks, natural resources, cultural treasures and education. And screws all of today’s kids.

The many cool 16-year-olds that I know are noticeably into two areas — music and farming. These city kids are embracing organic farming with a gusto and rigor that is inspiring. Oddly, many proclaim that their actions are more personal than political, though often as they come of age, politics creeps into the agenda. This new approach to governing and growing one’s own food