Environmental Debt | Environmental Debt

Why Brazil’s megadrought is a Wall Street failure

First published in the Guardian on April 10th, 2015

It’s hard to overestimate the appalling environmental and economic crisis that’s brewing in Brazil right now. The country is in the grip of a crippling megadrought – the result of pollution, deforestation and climate change – that deeply threatens its economy, society and environment. And the damage may be permanent: São Paulo, Brazil’s largest city and industrial center, has begun rationing water and is discussing whether or not it will need to depopulate in the near future.

But if Brazil’s drought is shocking, Wall Street’s shortsighted approach to the country is appalling. Institutional investors’ reports on the country – the seventh largest economy in the world – cite worries about inflation, government cutbacks and low consumer confidence. But I could not find a single analysis that mentioned the existential threat facing the country: the megadrought that is expected to last decades and could destroy the Brazilian economy. Not a single analysis cited the brutal global impact that this will cause.

In other words, a host of institutional investors have found worrisome things to say about Brazil, but none seem to be aware of – or, at least, willing to face – the country’s greatest threat.

Attempting to separate economies from environment – as many of these analysts seem to do – is like trying to separate mind and body. It simply doesn’t work.

We will never repair our business models and government policies to conform to the real environmental constraints of the 21st century until we repair this fundamental flaw in our economic system. Investors and analysts regularly review a host of factors – including national debt, inflation,

From antibiotics to fossil fuels: the inconvenient truth about sustainability

First published in the Guardian on April 6th, 2015

Humans are predictable. We routinely create extraordinary things and then disregard their impact and consequences because of our desire for convenience, comfort or profit. It’s easy to see why we’d want to take the shortsighted view: these pleasures and conveniences are compelling, at least until we realize they’re inflicting death by a thousand cuts on the world that we inhabit.

What do these extraordinary things look like? Well, antibiotics is a prime example. As someone who survived a dozen cases of childhood strep throat – not to mention surgery several months ago – I am eternally grateful for these drugs. Then again, while antibiotics saved my life after my surgery, the fear of an antibiotic-resistant infection propelled me to get out of the hospital as quickly as possible. These all-too-common infections, which are caused by our overuse of antibiotics, plague health care facilities around the world, driving up costs and mortality rates.

The problem extends well beyond hospitals: 80% of antibiotics in the US are used to induce rapid growth in healthy animals, and 95% of our meat is full of them. Meanwhile, unnecessary antibiotic use for common colds and respiratory infections also helps spur antibiotic-resistant infections.

The companies that produce and sell antibiotics are ignoring their collateral damage, dangers that they have known about for decades.

It’s time to sharpen our wits and use our intellect to overcome our basest instincts and reinvigorate our survival instinct. The only way companies will stop overselling these products is if we stop over-buying them.

Health-conscious consumers are already pressuring producers and retailers to eliminate

The cost of cancer: why health impacts belong on company balance sheets

First published in the Guardian, August 18th, 2014

Like so many of us, I have personal experience with cancer. I’ve had it twice, and so have both of my parents, six aunts and numerous friends. Just last month, someone very close to me was diagnosed with invasive breast cancer. These illnesses are more than just statistics. They require the patient, as well as their families and friends, to journey through a pretty broken medical system, and their emotional price is exorbitant.

My own cancer odyssey started about eight years ago and lasted two years. (I’ve been cancer-free for six years now and I’m doing fine, thanks). When I started feeling physically better, I felt the release of an emotional bottleneck. I went to a support group and each of the six people there told the same story: “I’m sure I got cancer for a reason and I just don’t know what it is yet.”

I responded, perhaps inappropriately: “You got cancer because a variety of companies, governments and shareholders decided that clean air, water and food were less important than their money.”

I’m sure everyone in that group was happy I never returned, but it was a great catharsis for me. At that moment, as an environmentalist working with business, my emotional self met my professional self on very clear terms. I realized we must begin including the environmental costs – including environment-related health costs – in every financial transaction.

Consider this: last year, the US spent $37bn on cancer drugs and over $100bn on cancer treatment alone. Those numbers don’t include the unreported and uncovered costs, such as nurses, acupuncture, psychotherapy, personal travel, supplements and caregivers’ expenses. I spent many thousands of dollars in such costs for

Radical cooperation is the only antidote to climate chaos

First published in the Guardian on June 20th, 2014

Throughout the 20th century, millions of people banded together in nonviolent revolutions across the globe to secure their freedom. From India to Czechoslovakia, South Africa to Poland, they declared their right to self-determination. Why, in the 21st century, are so few of us ready to fight together to secure our right to clean air and water?

To wake us from our fossil-fueled dreams, we need nothing less than radical cooperation.

Given the scope and importance of the conflict, it’s notable that many of the most poignant voices calling for a more holistic view of climate change are in fact battle-tested veterans of war. In a new report,National Security and the Accelerating Risks of Climate Change, an all-star array of retired US military brass weighs in, writing that “The potential security ramifications of global climate change should be serving as catalysts for cooperation and change. Instead, climate change impacts are already accelerating instability in vulnerable areas of the world and are serving as catalysts for conflict.”

What moves people to cooperative action? Environmental activists and scientists often ask how they can get Americans to care about climate change. And, on the other end of the spectrum, many business people are trying to encourage both their customers and Wall Street to work with them on solutions.

Meanwhile, those of us fighting to stave off climate chaos are working to send a palatable message, telling one another that we cannot scare people to death and that alarmism is ineffective. But watch The Weather Channel. Read the business news. Follow the agricultural commodity markets or your region’s farming news. Climate change’s high impact traumas and costs on people, planet and

Fossil fuels and peace don’t mix

First published in the Guardian on June 4th, 2014.

Why doesn’t anyone do anything about the situation in Ukraine?

One reason is that Russia supplies one third of the European Union’s oil and gas. The EU, in turn, represents 20% of the world’s economy, and any precipitous rise in the energy prices they pay is a very scary proposition.

In other words, oil and gas are both the fueling impetus for Vladimir Putin’s current forays and the reason for subsequent global inaction.

Russia is hardly alone. On the other side of Asia, China is risking a hot war with Vietnam in order to plant an oil rig in disputed waters. No nations have come to Vietnam’s side. Meanwhile, Russia and China have just signed a $400bn deal for 30 years of natural gas supply and demand. This alliance creates an economic and defensive bloc that could limit the rest of the world’s move towards safe energy development.

China’s $400bn bet on natural gas added to its central role as the world’s top manufacturer and primary emerging market, create a conflict. If the world chooses to place a price on carbon, which is desperately needed, China and Russia now have an alliance against other economies that might want to incentivize safer renewable energies.

Some of the world’s great oil reserves are on land governed by repressive regimes and dictators, including the House of Saud, Vladimir Putin, Sudanese warlords and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The pipelines and ports to transport this oil go through lands of every geo-political leaning, from Canada, whose tar sands aim to serve the US, to Kazakhstan, whose pipeline to China is now being expanded.

Oil and gas wars (hot, cold and economic) will only intensify as at

Addicted to cars: why can’t New York City break its bad transit habit?

First published in The Guardian, October 7th, 2013

Photo: Several high-volume roadways cut through Central Park. Photograph: Murdo Macleod/Murdo Macleod

Last week, on my way to Newark Airport from Manhattan, I looked across the highway to view the traffic entering New York’s most densely populated borough. The dedicated bus lane was moving steadily and swiftly toward the Lincoln Tunnel. The rest of the inbound highway was a parking lot, mostly filled with cars occupied by one person each. It was 7.45am and these cars would spend the next hour – or more – driving the last five miles into Manhattan. Meanwhile, the buses would get there in 15 minutes max.

Why do these people drive? I dunno.

On buses, trains and ferries, passengers can read, text, talk on the phone, rest, sleep, write, do a puzzle, check email and do anything else that’s not inconsiderate toward their neighbors; they have far more options than when they’re driving. And most modes of public transportation are faster, cheaper and easier than driving and parking in Manhattan.

So it confounds me why people choose to drive when they could take public transportation.

But fuggedaboutem. Let’s talk about the rest of us. This folly doesn’t just affect the drivers, but also hurts everyone else.

When private cars enter Manhattan by the hundreds of thousands every day, they create air pollution that adds huge extra healthcare costs for the city. New studies actually show that air pollution costs more than tobacco. Drivers also create unsafe streets when they ignore crosswalks, traffic signals and cellphone restrictions. And they make ungodly noise, which, for me, is almost unbearable. I am certain that there are huge uncounted costs in cellular stress and overall anxiety caused by the sensory assault of

New Business Alternatives for Obama’s Climate Change Program

First published in the Huffington Post, September 9, 2013

President Obama’s emphatic stances on climate change during his inaugural address were indeed welcome words. Most analysts are focusing on the administration’s ability to use new regulatory powers, largely through the EPA. But there are two other options that are currently underused and under-imagined.

First, patent pooling has been used since the 19th century to spur innovation in industry to support either a wartime emergency or a financial debacle. I believe that climate change qualifies on both counts. And the Securities and Exchange Commission has new rules that require public corporations to disclose their climate change risk. These rules are new (2010) and currently vague, but have the potential to begin the incorporation of external costs as well as long-term impacts into corporate P&Ls and balance sheets.

Farmers, most businesses, victims of recent extreme weather events (drought, heat wave, fire, flood), and the taxpaying citizens forced to cover the costs of these weather events all understand viscerally that something’s gotta change. And quickly. President Obama appears to concur.

It is time to change intellectual property rules so that competitors can cooperate and also retain financial protection. When President Franklin Roosevelt took America into WWII, he set tremendously audacious goals for industry and also called for national sacrifice to support the military effort. Many Americans and car companies especially bristled at this. However in hindsight, it is clear that this wartime effort not only enabled the Allied defeat of fascism but laid the foundation for America’s post-war technological and industrial dominance. If current government policy (all governments, not just American) prioritized renewable energy as the U.S. government prioritized military manufacturing in 1941, the world would quickly see a revolution in renewable energy technologies.

What’s Going On. Business and History

Businesses' power to impact society extends beyond their carbon footprints and working conditions. What companies have fundamentally changed the world? Motown is not only a delight (of course, it's playing now to inspire me), but also showcases the power of business to change culture. And it's not alone. Other businesses also altered the zeitgeist and, in turn, history.

How West’s throwaway culture destroys basic freedoms in China

First published in The Guardian, August 23rd, 2013

Photo: People walk on Tiananmen Square as heavy pollution lingers in the air. Photograph: Diego Azubel/EPA

I recently had the good fortune to meet a Chinese student, Wei Qing, who grew up in Luoyang, an ancient Chinese city famous as the capital city for thirteen dynasties.

Luoyang is nowhere near the largest pollution zones of China and Qing is proud of the culture she learned as a child and student. She’s a well-educated young woman, getting her masters degree in Environmental Education at an American university. She has the energy and enthusiasm of those ready to roll up their sleeves and do great work in the world.

As we enjoyed and admired the Nova Scotia skies together, Qing noted, “There are never blue skies in most of China.” I demurred, “Never?” She said, “Well, perhaps one or two days a year, but basically, the sky is never blue where I grew up.”

Again, I was taken aback as Qing explained that a blue sky was a great luxury for her. (I was only able to find anecdotal data to quantify the actual days of blue skies over Chinese cities.) The acceptance of the unacceptable remains: Qing does not expect to see what we count as a core part of our basic wellbeing.

The natural next step in my mind was to recognise that it is the production of our cheap goods that is the largest cause of this horrifying condition. We must urgently reconsider the true costs of our everyday behaviour.

It is one thing to read statistics such as 3.5% of China’s GDP is caused by environmental degradation, almost certainly a low estimate, or see pictures on the worst air pollution days in Beijing,

While the Hills Are Still Alive

First published in the Huffington Post, May 16, 2013

Sorry if I put this ear-tickling Rogers and Hammerstein song into your head today, but as you’re now stuck singing it all day, you might as well listen to the lyrics. The alpine mountains that go so well with the song’s swelling orchestrations are in retreat. In Glacier National Park in the United States, there were 150 glaciers at the turn of the 20th century. Now, there are only 26, and those are shrinking rapidly. The same is happening for Maria von Trapp’s beloved Austrian Alps. This was almost unimaginable a generation ago and would have sounded preposterous in 1959. Now, when we can well imagine, no — witness, the impacts of climate change, we still act as though our actions have no impact.

I spent a beautiful day in the Delaware Water Gap area last week. It’s amazing how close this breathtaking region is to NYC. But when I saw the sign above about polluted fish my delight was truly deflated. This park and sanctuary does not protect the nature within its boundaries. No national park classification prevents pollution from spoiling its air, land and sea.

You can’t eat the fish in an area famous for great fishing spots and if this fish is not good for us to eat, imagine the experience for the fish themselves, as well as the effects this contamination has on the rest of the critters that need the fish for their diets, and the rest of the ecosystem of which the fish is a central part. In 1959, when The Sound of Music hit Broadway and three years before Rachel Carson published Silent Spring, it