On April 3, prolific journalist and environmentalist Paula DiPerna joined term associate professor of economics Kurt Semm for a discussion on the value of natural assets. The event, which kicked off Earth Month at Barnard, set the stage for DiPerna to deliver a timely message to the College community: “Nature is the most exploited worker in the history of the world.”
DiPerna, who joined famed oceanographer Jacques-Yves Cousteau on the research vessel Calypso as a policy advisor and documentarian in the 1980s, found considerable roots in her climate activism when filming for a year in the Amazon. “The rain was constant and tumultuous,” said DiPerna. “You can now walk across the Amazon, that’s how dry it has become. It’s unthinkable — a rainforest without rain? Poets can’t even create that image.”
The author of 2023’s Pricing the Priceless: The Financial Transformation to Value the Planet, Solve the Climate Crisis, and Protect Our Most Precious Assets spent the evening at the Francine A. LeFrak Foundation Center for Well-Being unpacking how an interdisciplinary blend of activism, environmental science, economics, and ethics is the framework necessary to “redesign the financial structures” around ecological values.
“We have a very simple system: money in, money out, debit, credit,” said DiPerna. “And good accounting means for every credit you have a debit, so you stay in balance. We’re way out of whack when it comes to nature.”
Adjunct lecturer of English Linn Mehta, who facilitated the event, shared that “in confronting all the damage that Big Oil has caused, DiPerna clarifies how carbon markets provide an important way to rethink the value we place on intangible elements of the environment — such as clean air, water, and the ecology of growing things. She asks a critical question that the College’s Environmental Science Department continues to explore: ‘In our tense and cherished world, what is money for?’”
After the discussion, DiPerna answered questions from audience members about market incentives and ecological accountability — and reminded the community that even in the face of an imperiled planet, “there has to be hope.” (Responses have been edited for length and clarity.)
How should economists and scientists collaborate to form carbon budgets?
There’s so much advanced measurement now, like knowing what trees can sequester, [that] they’re always changing, that every species is different, [how] the weather changes or not, or the ability to sequester those [changes] down. You can be accurate enough not to feel that it’s a fraud. The perfect is very often the enemy of the good, and so this is an imperfect science — this measurement of ecosystem services — but it’s getting more and more accurate. When investors come [into the science] of it, they have a hole. Asset managers, like BlackRock, are beginning to understand that investors have to be pricing the risks. They ask a different set of questions, and then you get insurance companies to insure contracts.
The only incentive is to deliver [on a carbon market] because if you are found to be fraudulent, you’re not going to get coverage on your contract. We are talking about millions of tons of carbon that have to be removed [from the environment]. The whole industrial revolution depended on taking these very precious assets [from nature]. Fossil fuels are an asset that’s been there since dinosaurs. We went after it, and the whole industrial revolution was all about taking it out of the ground, burning it, and putting it up in the atmosphere. The whole future now depends on putting it back underground.
To what extent [will] the artificial intelligence race harm our environment, and is there hope that future AI can alleviate the environment in some ways?
There has to be hope. It’s in our hands. Right now, AI is out of control — there are no public purpose guardrails. We could put in very strong guardrails, but no one is doing it. There is a danger [to it] because the cloud is not benign. Every photograph that we have sitting up there is eating up electricity just by being there, just sitting there, undeleted. So we need to be thinking about that ourselves. From a point of view of electricity generation, that’s an extraordinary demand, and AI will help us be more efficient but maybe not soon enough. At some point, you have to immediately start looking at why you’re doing whatever [you do]. Why are you causing this increase in electricity use? If you must increase it, can you be more efficient and make sure that we don’t turn AI into an operation for entertainment? It’s up to us to think about it.
When thinking about social-historical factors that cannot be accounted for through straightforward financing, can we privatize a push for resilience?
As soon as you start privatizing physical infrastructure, you’re essentially privatizing public policy. For example, privatization of space leads you to SpaceX, which leads you to excess. But I believe in one thing at a time. There are a lot of accountants in the world — many more accountants working on P&Ls [profit and loss] than working for social justice. So what if all the accountants got religion, saw P&L, and started talking about it in their field? I think you’d have some spillover on other things.
People are limited in understanding things that aren’t in front of us. The more it can be in front of us, the more we have a comfort level to deal with the things that are not in front of us. This financial engineering, this redesign, is something you can actually do, and it would go off, and then you can control the potential downsides with legislation and policy. There is a built-in illegitimacy to the system, and the whole question of Pricing the Priceless is: What is money for if not to improve social justice conditions? It’s really just a lubricant, it’s nice to have, but it’s not an end in itself.
