Why ‘Soft Landing’ Optimists Shouldn’t Celebrate Just Yet

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The principle is that nature is an unpaid worker providing services, like carbon sequestration, soil retention, water filtration, replenishing raw materials and more. It is providing an invisible subsidy to world economies. Protecting the environment is portfolio management. How would placing a price tag on nature help? Take carbon pricing. If you can put a value on a ton of carbon dioxide, which we can do now, then why wouldn’t it be feasible to pay countries to not drill for oil or cut their trees, to protect resources instead of exploiting them? Poor countries that have abundant natural resources are loaning their economic resources, like the carbon-sequestering value of their rainforests, to rich countries without compensation. Last year at COP [the U.N. climate conference], [Special Presidential Envoy for Climate] John Kerry practically begged the Democratic Republic of the Congo not to drill for oil in rainforest and peat lands, which would release lots of carbon, and the retort was “pay us.” It’s not a bad answer, actually. Are there examples of successful projects for preserving natural resources? The Forest Resilience Bond is the brainchild of four Berkeley graduate students. What they did was look at standing forests in the Lake Tahoe area as infrastructure. And they raised funds to maintain the forest — like you would for an infrastructure project — from the beneficiaries of the environment, such as the local wildlife service, the tourism industry, insurers and even hydropower companies that rely on standing forest to replenish groundwater. That kind of bond could be done all around the world. Why add such a pricing structure when economies can exploit nature for free? We are facing real costs now. Nature is the thing underpinning our economies and it is a depreciating asset. We speculate about price all the time when it comes to company valuations. Yet the atmosphere is worth nothing. We need a new kind of thinking.