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This “fourth benchmark” goes beyond metrics comparisons to a baseline year, to competitors, or to an internal company goal. The Gold Standard would use material, science-based key performance indicators and goals that could identify a truly sustainable business. Willard is actively working with a broad range of stakeholders from the capital markets to non-profit sustainability experts such as the Natural Step and GISR.

And one factor pushing the acceptance and utilization of metrics is the shortening timeframes of risk management in the wake of recent climate events. Gil Friend, founder and CEO or Natural Logic, Inc., said he trusts that each new measuring tool adds new worlds of understanding of “capital,” whether monetary, environmental or social.

the tax frame affected the outcome

I think there’s an attractive version of the carbon tax if somebody thought about its design,”

The crucial question, at least to her, is whether (and when) we want to use the tools of decision science to try and steer people toward better choices. If our preferences aren’t fixed the way we think they are — if, as Weber has argued, they’re sometimes merely constructed on the spot in response to a choice we face — why not try new methods (ordering options, choosing strategic words, creating group effects and so forth) to elicit preferences aligned with our long-term interest? That has to be better, in Weber’s opinion, than having people blunder unconsciously into an environmental catastrophe.

“Let’s start with the fact that climate change is anthropogenic,” Weber told me one morning in her Columbia office. “More or less, people have agreed on that. That means it’s caused by human behavior. That’s not to say that engineering solutions aren’t important. But if it’s caused by human behavior, then the solution probably also lies in changing human behavior.”

we have a “finite pool of worry,”

which means we’re unable to maintain our fear of climate change when a different problem — a plunging stock market, a personal emergency — comes along. We simply move one fear into the worry bin and one fear out. And even if we could remain persistently concerned about a warmer world? Weber described what she calls a “single-action bias.”

Prompted by a distressing emotional signal, we buy a more efficient furnace or insulate our attic or vote for a green candidate — a single action that effectively diminishes global warming as a motivating factor. And that leaves us where we started.