I dont expect much from the G-20 meeting this week, but if I had my wish, the leaders of the worlds 20 top economies would commit themselves to a new standard of accounting call it Market to Mother Nature accounting. Why? Because its now obvious that the reason were experiencing a simultaneous meltdown in the financial system and the climate system is because we have been mispricing risk in both arenas producing a huge excess of both toxic assets and toxic air that now threatens the stability of the whole planet. Just as A.I.G. sold insurance derivatives at prices that did not reflect the real costs and the real risks of massive defaults (for which we the taxpayers ended up paying the difference), oil companies, coal companies and electric utilities today are selling energy products at prices that do not reflect the real costs to the environment and real risks of disruptive climate change (so future taxpayers will end up paying the difference). Whenever products are mispriced and do not reflect the real costs and risks associated with their usage, people go to excess. And that is exactly what happened in the financial marketplace and in the energy/environmental marketplace during the credit bubble. Our biggest financial-services companies, some of which came to be seen as too big to fail, engaged in complex financial trading schemes that did not adequately price in the costs and risks of a market reversal. A.I.G., for instance, was selling insurance for all kinds of financial instruments and did not have anywhere near adequate reserves to cover claims if things went badly wrong, as they did. And our biggest energy companies, utilities and auto companies became dependent on cheap hydrocarbons that spin off climate-changing greenhouse gases, and we clearly have not forced them, through a carbon tax, to price in the true risks and costs to society from these climate-changing fuels.

THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN: While Im convinced that our current financial crisis is the product of both The Market and Mother Nature hitting the wall at once telling us we need to grow in more sustainable ways some might ask this: We know when the market hits a wall. It shows up in red numbers on the Dow. But Mother Nature doesn’t have a Dow. What makes you think shes hitting a wall, too? And even if she is: Who cares? When my 401(k) is collapsing, its hard to worry about my sea level rising. Its true, Mother Nature doesn’t tell us with one simple number how shes feeling. But if you follow climate science, what has been striking is how insistently some of the worlds best scientists have been warning in just the past few months that climate change is happening faster and will bring bigger changes quicker than we anticipated just a few years ago. Indeed, if Mother Nature had a Dow, you could say that it, too, has been breaking into new (scientific) lows.