What Price Earth?

How do we attach a value to the priceless? As veteran environmentalist Paula DiPerna has written, in approaching the issue of climate change, "the elemental task is to assign measurable value, while acknowledging that the environment is essentially invaluable."

More and more women are facing this environmental paradox. Over the last several months, I talked to DiPerna and two others who are moving local governments, corporations, shareholders, and ordinary citizens to act for the invaluable earth.

While Washington hovers in confusion and indecision on climate change, the real action is local. ICLEI—Local Governments for Sustainability has been at it for over a dozen years, offering technology and services for mayors to tackle the urgent need to reduce green house gas emissions and rethink the energy portfolios driving municipal facilities and services.

“A lean and discreet non-profit, very lean,” is the way Michele Wyman, ICLEI’s executive director in the United States, described her organization, which has 250 U.S. members and more than 700 internationally. Lean and discreet applies equally well to the tall, intense Wyman, who explained that since 1993, ICLEI has been measuring and monitoring emissions with its member cities and towns.

Today ICLEI’s logo often shares space with that of the two-year old Mayors’ for Climate Protection, the initiative of Seattle’s Greg Nickels, who has joined forces with more than 600 mayors from every state, D.C. and Puerto Rico. They have pledged to meet the CO2 reductions in the Kyoto Protocol, the very reductions the federal government declined to commit to when it refused to sign the international treaty. How will these mayors reach that goal? This is where ICLEI’s expertise comes in. Its popular Cities for Climate Protection program begins with ICLEI software to calculate CO2 emissions from municipal buildings, cars and trucks, public transport, and landfills. With this information, mayors enact efficiency and conservation policies. Ongoing monitoring is the last step. In 2005, as Wyman wrote on Minutemanmedia.org, a tally of some 200 cities showed “reductions of harmful carbon dioxide emissions totaling 23 million tons and, as a result, city budget savings of $535 million.”

Arlington, Texas, is one of the growing number of participating cities displayed with information on their climate protection program on ICLEI’s dynamic online map. It reduced energy use by 26% over four years by, among other things, installing energy efficient lighting and switching to LED traffic signals that consume 80% less energy than the older systems. Rocky Anderson of Salt Lake City, one of the country’s most noted green mayors, credits ICLEI as essential in bringing about his city’s emissions cuts.

Nonetheless, Wyman points out that “local action cannot replace national. It shows what can be done. We need a national climate policy which recognizes local, regional and state interaction.” Wyman believes that it will be closer to 2010 before we will have significant federal legislation.

Mobilizing Shareholder Power

Socially responsible investing (SRI) has emerged as another strategy mindful of the economic quotient of climate protection. Institutions and individuals are connecting the dots between their investments and environmental degradation as they push for change, and women are flourishing in SRI leadership roles, said Leslie Lowe, director of the energy and environment program at the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility. ICCR is a 35 year-old coalition of 275 faith-based institutional investors—Protestant, Catholic and Jewish. These include religious communities, pension funds, healthcare corporations, foundations, denominations and dioceses whose combined portfolios are worth an estimated $110 billion.

Lowe holds a law degree from Harvard and directed the New York City Environmental Justice Alliance before coming to ICCR five years ago. There she focuses her passion for environmental justice through shareholder resolutions and other economic tools in the SRI arsenal. “Women occupy some very prominent high visibility positions in the SRI community,” she said, naming, in addition to her own program, several other companies—Domini Social Investments, Calvert, CERES—with women in charge. While there are male leaders as well, women, she said, seem to outnumber men as financial analysts in SRI, although not in mainstream investment.

“At the risk of sounding sexist,” Lowe remarked, “women are more intuitively inclined toward sustainability. If anything, SRI is about sustainable enterprise—there is a focus on long term, multi-generational issues—global warming, pesticides, contamination of the environment because it affects children.” It is one area, she emphasized, “where women are using economic analysis, economic power and marshalling that for social change.”

In recent years, the shareholder resolution has had increased success as a tactic for pressuring publicly held corporations in energy and related fields, according to Sister Patricia Wolf, who retired last year as executive director of ICCR. A member of the Sisters of Mercy—and one of many nuns who have taken prominent roles as investor activists—she noted in a July 2, 2006, New York Times interview that in 2006, human rights resolutions attracted 22.5% of the vote at Boeing, 25% at Chevron and 23% at Halliburton. In years past, a few percentage points was reason for optimism. Such resolutions make the case that better practices will both boost a company’s reputation and bring in bigger financial returns. There is a growing body of research to back up those claims and respond to SRI’s skeptics.

ICCR and other SRIs look beyond energy companies to other segments of the economy with major impact on global warming. For example, successful negotiations with Toll Brothers has led to a push for energy efficient building guidelines for the home building industry as a whole.

Carbon Cap and Trade

“We are at the beginning of the transformation of the energy economy of the world,” Lowe remarked, toward a new economy that takes into account natural capital, starting with the air we breathe. Both Lowe and ICLEI’s Wyman see carbon cap and trade as one potential step towards this new economy—a strategy that Paula DiPerna promotes as an executive vice president at the Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX). As author, policy analyst, and consultant, DiPerna’s long career in the environmental field developed during 20 years with the Cousteau Society, founded by ocean explorer Jacques-Yves Cousteau. Then, while president of the Joyce Foundation, she initiated a series of grants that launched the pilot phase of CCX.

The company bills itself as the “the world’s first and North America’s only greenhouse gas registry, reduction and trading system.” Its voluntary members agree to legally binding rules in meeting established cuts. Carbon is the commodity traded. Those who reduce below the targets have a surplus to sell or bank. Those who exceed must buy Carbon Financial Instruments to comply.

In a brief phone interview, DiPerna stated her views succinctly, “No cap, no scarcity, no value. If you don’t cap green house gas emissions, you are just moving them around.” Caps ensure the value of measures that reduce emissions. Addressing the climate crisis is a matter, she explained, of lining up policy, leadership, technology, and capital. “We need an effort to rival the Apollo project—a man on the moon,” to break down technology barriers. “We need the best minds on this effort, but they aren’t there yet—and we need 100% of them.”

The CCX has its share of supporters and critics. No major environmental organizations have joined. Some argue that the federal government should lead cap and trade efforts. But CCX as a model gives corporations and other member groups hands on experience. And, though the U.S. government has yet to come on board, in June, the House of Representatives passed legislation to work with the CCX to make its own functions and facilities carbon neutral.

Some critics support caps but object to trading on the very air we breathe. Time will tell whether it is wise to commit such a significant endeavor to the private sector. This is a complex issue. DiPerna herself described serious problems in the privatization of public policy in an essay she contributed to the Robin Morgan 2003 feminist anthology, Sisterhood Is Forever. “Protecting natural resources,” she wrote, “is incompatible with a privatized concept of public service.”

In that same essay, DiPerna called for women to play a prominent role in managing the environment for a successful green revolution. Like Leslie Lowe, she sees women as the natural caretakers of the earth.