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