One of the first classes she took in her freshman year was about science and society. And the professor who taught the course encouraged students to do their own research and bring evidence to support opinions that might challenge their own. Zakrzewski accepted the challenge wholeheartedly but soon realized there wasn’t any concrete data to support the views of people in her community that climate change was a hoax.

“I kept doing research and was like, ‘Man, the data’s not adding up, and this is not looking good for me,’” she says. She grappled with the idea that maybe what she had been brought up to believe was wrong and turned to her parish priest for advice. He told her to set aside politics and do what she felt was right.

Her light-bulb moment was quickly followed by an “oh-no” moment – Zakrzewski felt she had to make up for the time she had spent denying climate science. She started actively lobbying members of Congress on climate policy and in 2020 began working for Citizens’ Climate Lobby, a national non-partisan environmental organization. 

For Zakrzewski, environmentalism and conservativism aren’t opposing forces. “It doesn’t make any sense to say you’re as vehemently pro-life as I am and then say, ‘But the environment doesn’t matter, clean air doesn’t matter, and clean water doesn’t matter,’” she says. “That didn’t add up.”

Feeling like she didn’t have a home in today’s Republican Party, Zakrzewski and a couple of like-minded young conservative environmentalists launched a podcast last year called Green Tea Party Radio in the hope of giving a voice to others with similar views. Zakrzewski, now 26, is part of a growing minority of young conservatives who are deeply concerned about the warming planet and want to see their concerns reflected in a GOP they feel has strayed from its conservationist roots. 

Researchers say there is a widening generational divide among Republicans when it comes to their concerns about climate change and some of their views on energy policy. Since early 2021, when the Biden administration came into power, this trend has only gotten worse for the party, as support among Republicans in general for renewable-energy development has shrunk, while the support among younger conservatives specifically has grown, according to polling by Pew Research. “So in effect, what we’re seeing here is a bigger gap between younger and older Republicans in their views about the direction we should go on energy than even four years ago,” says Alec Tyson, an associate director of research at Pew Research. 

Republicans aged 18 to 29 are 30 percentage points more likely to support more wind power and 26 percentage points more likely to favour more solar power than those 65 and older. When it comes to their views on climate, 79% of younger Republicans acknowledge that human activity contributes to climate change, whereas only 47% of elder GOP voters say the same. 

For the longest [time], the GOP has kind of kicked the can down the road and said, ‘We’ll worry about that later.’  The time is now.

—Katie Zakrzewski, Green Tea Party Radio

Observers say the GOP would ignore these shifting dynamics at its own peril as millennials and Gen Zs become a voter block that can make or break an election. In November, when Americans will be asked to choose either former president Donald Trump or Vice President Kamala Harris, 40 million members of Gen Z will be eligible to vote, according to the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement. In 2020, millennials surpassed baby boomers as the United States’ largest generation, with more than 70 million people. While Corporate Knights went to press before the election results were known, young voters could prove a decisive force.

Green at heart

As one of the founders of the American Conservation Coalition (ACC), Danielle Butcher Franz, 27, has been working to mobilize young conservatives around climate change since 2017. Recently, the organization attended the Republican National Convention, with a booth on the “new youth movement,” encouraging passersby to “leave a legacy” of environmental conservation. 

Unlike Zakrzewski, who came from a conservative family, Butcher Franz grew up in what she described as a left-of-centre family that listened to National Public Radio and supported candidates from the left-leaning Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party (DFL). Some of her earliest memories are of handing out stickers at parades for various DFL candidates in northern Minnesota. 

In her teenage angsty years, she found herself playing devil’s advocate in dinnertime discussions about current events. Eventually she realized that she believed some of the things she was saying to stir the pot and that she was actually more conservative-leaning than her family. But she was too afraid to tell her parents at the time and started an anonymous Twitter account with the handle @RepublicanSass to engage with other conservatives. “I started just tweeting out hot takes and opinions and trying to find a community, really, to test my own views and see if these were things that I really agreed with,” she says.

The account took off. Soon it had more than 20,000 followers, leading to opportunities to attend conservative conferences, do internships and write op-eds. She eventually changed her handle to her own name. Shortly after, the 17-year-old got the opportunity to go to the Conservative Political Action Conference, where she met ACC co-founder Benji Backer, then 16, in person for the first time. The two became fast friends and quickly realized there was a gap in the right-of-centre when it came to environmentalism, and the issue of the climate crisis specifically.

Their conversations eventually led them to create the ACC, to give conservatives a voice on these issues and “to show them that they can be at the table and propose their own solutions,” says Butcher Franz, now the organization’s CEO. “These were issues that we cared a lot about personally and we knew our peers cared a lot about, but there really weren’t any Republican leaders talking about these issues in a way that was productive and that resonated with young people.”

She says that this will have to change if the GOP wants to be electable in the future: “If Republicans don’t come up with an answer to the climate question, they will become politically irrelevant.”

A green tradition 

The Republican Party was not always seen as inhospitable to environmentalists. 

Often referred to as the “conservation president,” Theodore Roosevelt created 23 new sites in the U.S. national park system. During his presidency, Roosevelt also established 230 million acres of public lands for conservation efforts. Richard Nixon, for his part, created the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). And in 1987, Ronald Reagan signed on to the Montreal Protocol, an international agreement that helped shrink a gaping ozone hole over Antarctica.

But in recent decades, Republicans have ratcheted up their opposition to environmental policies and international agreements that hope to lessen humans’ impacts on the world. Not a single Republican member of Congress voted for the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, which environmentalists heralded as the largest climate investment the country had ever made but conservatives criticized as big government spending that would fuel inflation. Critics say the undercurrent of climate denialism that exists within the party has been politically driven – an act of opposition to eight years of former president Barack Obama and four years of Biden-administration policies. But the seeds of that opposition to green policies were planted much earlier than that. 

Despite supporting the Montreal Protocol, Reagan’s administration also worked to roll back environmental regulations and cut the EPA’s budget in the 1980s. In 2001, then-president George W. Bush announced to the world that his government would not implement the Kyoto Protocol, a predecessor to the Paris Agreement that Donald Trump would eventually pull the country out of, too. While in power, Trump called climate change a “hoax” and dismantled almost 100 environmental rules and regulations, according to a New York Times analysis. 

If Republicans don’t come up with an answer to the climate question, they will become politically irrelevant.

—Danielle Butcher Franz, CEO, American Conservation Coalition

Some green Republicans are still encouraged by positive movement they’ve seen in the last few years. In 2021, Utah Representative John Curtis, who is running for Mitt Romney’s Senate seat, founded the Conservative Climate Caucus, a group of more than 80 Republican members of Congress. The group has acknowledged that emissions need to be cut to tackle climate change. Caucuses don’t have any power to propose legislation, but they serve to educate lawmakers on particular issues.

These lawmakers tend to support technologies such as nuclear power, carbon capture and storage, and hydrogen fuel rather than phasing out fossil fuels in favour of more wind and solar energy. They also oppose regulations and taxes as emissions-cutting tools. “[We focus on] policy around scaling up innovations of advancements in technologies so that we can reduce emissions using innovation and policies that support innovation more than a heavy-handed government approach,” says Luke Bolar, the chief external affairs officer at ClearPath, a conservative clean-energy think tank.

The party, however, still faces an uphill battle in convincing young voters that it’s getting serious on climate change. Project 2025, a 900-page document that the Heritage Foundation – a conservative think tank – produced as a road map for a second Trump administration, doesn’t help much. A recent study by Energy Innovation found that if Trump wins the election and implements the plan’s recommendations, it could result in billions of tonnes of additional carbon emissions.

The party’s official 16-page platform for the presidential campaign doesn’t even mention climate change and reaffirms Trump’s promise to “DRILL, BABY, DRILL.”   

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Another recent report from the Center for American Progress said that 23% of federal elected officials in Congress were climate deniers, and all the members identified as climate deniers were Republicans. But Bolar disputes the report’s conclusions, saying that some of the statements used to paint lawmakers as climate deniers are from as far back as 2010. He adds that many of them have since joined the Conservative Climate Caucus. 

Bolar says that most Republican lawmakers are aware that younger conservatives have a “higher sense of urgency” when it comes to the climate crisis and that they need to “build a bridge” to them by talking about solutions. “The gulf there is communicating what they’re for and the policies that they support,” he says. “That’s a challenge, and I think it’s improving but not fully solved yet.”

What about the Democrats?

For Democrats, age isn’t as much a factor as it is for Republicans when it comes to attitudes toward climate change and energy issues, according to Pew Research. Alec Tyson says that a large majority of Democrats think climate change is a big problem that needs to be addressed and that renewables need to be prioritized over fossil fuels. That level of support doesn’t change much across age groups within that voting block. 

Some commentators say there isn’t much fear in Democratic circles that they’ll lose young climate-conscious voters to the Republicans, even if Harris stood up for fracking on the campaign trail and kept climate talk to a minimum. The larger concern is that they simply might not show up to vote at all if they feel candidates aren’t strong enough on environmental issues. In the presidential election, Trump had closed the gap with President Joe Biden when it came to young voters, but Harris’s candidacy reversed this trend. Since its early days, the Harris campaign has caused a “youthquake,” as polls in early August showed her more than 20 points ahead of Trump with young voters in four swing states: Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona and Pennsylvania. By September, 52% of registered voters and 61% of likely voters under 30 backed Harris; only 29% to 30% planned to vote for Trump, according to national polling by Harvard’s Institute of Politics.

In the long-term view, young conservatives think these dynamics could evolve if Republican leadership can change its tune by acknowledging man-made climate change and proposing solutions. “So much of the GOP says, ‘We hate the Green New Deal, we hate what they’re proposing,’ and then they don’t propose anything,” Zakrzewski says. “It’s not good enough to shoot something down. If we’re going to say something is bad, then what’s your alternative?”

As November approaches, young conservatives who care about environmental policy are grappling with how to approach voting this year. For Zakrzewski, she’s likely going to vote in the down-ballot races and leave the top of the ticket blank, given Trump’s anti-climate rhetoric. “It seems like every four years, I might as well write in Mickey Mouse,” she says. 

Historically, Republicans have been far better than their Democratic opponents at uniting around common causes – namely low taxes and limited government – and leaving behind what they disagree on. But if the GOP fails to evolve in significant ways on climate and energy policy (or at the very least in how it is perceived on these issues), researchers question whether those ties will hold the party’s supporters together or lead to a realignment of American politics.

A study from University of Colorado Boulder found that voters’ opinions on climate change are already making a significant difference in close presidential elections. Researchers found that views on climate cost Republicans the 2020 presidential election and that, for voters, climate “was one of the strongest predictors of whom they voted for in 2020, especially among independents.” The study estimated that there would have been a 3% swing in favour of Republicans that election year had voters’ level of concern about climate remained the same as it was in 2016. This electoral reality could get more challenging for Republicans, as young conservatives and voters generally are increasingly anxious about global warming. 

It remains to be seen how youth on both sides of the aisle will shape not just the November election, but the future of American climate policy and the global energy transition. 

Environmental conservatives are hopeful that there could be a strong shakeup in the GOP’s policies on climate as younger generations of voters start to run for public office and rise through the party’s ranks. But for Zakrzewski, there’s no time like the present to start making change within the party. “For the longest [time] the GOP has kind of kicked the can down the road and said, ‘We’ll worry about that later.’ The time is now, and I think this election is going to be a decisive one. You’re either at the table or you’re on the menu,” she says.

Alex Robinson is a journalist based in Ottawa.

The post Can young Republicans wake their party up to climate change? appeared first on Corporate Knights.

Now, as he and Harris launch their campaign in earnest, environmental advocates are hoping he’ll use his straight-talking to get more Americans on board with climate action – even if his environmental record is mixed.

“As governor, Tim Walz has made huge strides to address the climate crisis,” said Stevie O’Hanlon, Sunrise Movement’s communications director. “He has done this by pitching climate action as a way to make people’s everyday lives better, create good-paying green jobs and invest in making communities stronger.”

During his time as governor, the former teacher and school principal, has adopted strict emissions standards for cars and ushered in legislation that will see Minnesota’s electricity generation be carbon-free by 2040. But he has also faced criticism from some environmentalists who argue that the agricultural industry has too much influence over state officials.

Earlier this summer, a coalition of environmental groups called People Not Polluters said the agencies and regulators in Walz’s government suffered from what they termed meaning they were “routinely” siding with “polluters, not people,” having approved a controversial Enbridge oil pipeline in 2020 and failed to address pollution in private wells.

“Governor Walz didn’t create this problem, but he needs to fix it. Instead, it is getting worse on his watch. So the Legislature needs to hold hearings,” Minnesota environmentalist Don Arnosti told the MinnPost in June 2024.

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Reflecting on Walz’s time as  a congressman from 2007 to 2018, the League of Conservation (LCV) gave his voting record a 75% on its scorecard, which analyzes how Congress votes on issues such as energy, climate change and worker protection.

Despite this less-than-sparkling congressional scorecard, most major environmental organizations have fallen in line behind the Harris-Walz ticket, given his stronger record as governor. Ben Jealous, the executive director of the Sierra Club, trumpeted Walz’s experience.

“The Harris-Walz ticket is one that understands the fight before us, isn’t afraid to tackle climate change head-on and will continue to build upon the legacy of the Biden-Harris administration moving forward,” Jealous said.

Coral Davenport, of The New York Times, wrote that if Harris and Walz win the election in November, Walz “would bring the most substantive record on climate of any incoming president or vice president since Vice President Al Gore.”

At a time when the world needs the United States to up its climate ambition, advocates say that his record might prove to be invaluable.

The post Can Tim Walz mobilize Americans on climate change? appeared first on Corporate Knights.

A backlash to bans on gas infrastructure in new buildings has arrived in Canada.

Last week, Vancouver City Council voted to repeal its prohibition of “natural” gas for heating new buildings in a move climate advocates say will jeopardize the city’s climate goals.

“Council’s decision is [a] big step back for a city renowned for its leadership,” said Betsy Agar, the director of the Pembina Institute’s buildings program. “To stick natural gas back into new home construction would jeopardize Vancouver’s climate goals and do nothing to reduce the costs of operating buildings over the long term.”

The repeal comes as state and municipal gas bans are going through a bit of an evolution in the United States, as they have continued to spread but have also suffered some setbacks in court. More than two dozen Republican-led state governments have barred municipalities from introducing their own prohibitions. And the first city in North America to introduce a ban – Berkeley, California – was forced to repeal its ban after a 2023 Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruling rolled it back.

Vancouver’s move came after a change in government. City council originally implemented the ban (which did not extend to gas used for cooking) in 2020. But last week, a group of conservative councillors, who were part of Mayor Ken Sim’s centre-right ABC Vancouver party elected in 2022, tried to turn the issue into an affordability one. The contingent claimed that reversing the prohibition was necessary to keep the cost of new homes down. Sim, who was called into the council meeting on Zoom while he was on vacation to cast a tie-breaking vote, said that “we all love the environment, but we need balance. We also have an affordability crisis.”

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Climate advocates have, however, questioned whether the move will improve affordability, given that electrified buildings can be built cost-effectively.

“The housing crisis in Vancouver is driven by multiple complex factors, and delaying the construction of reliable, climate-safe buildings that are affordable to heat and cool is not a viable solution,” Agar said. “Local governments should collaborate with the provincial government to ensure new homes meet the highest standards for efficiency and electrification. This approach not only reduces emissions but also lowers energy costs for residents.”

Vancouver’s buildings are responsible for approximately 55% of the city’s total greenhouse gas emissions. Considering that, advocates say the repeal of the ban will greatly hinder the city’s pledge to reduce its carbon emissions by 50% by 2030. City staff have warned council that rolling back the bylaw could set the city back “tens of thousands” of tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions.

The new policy will likely come into effect in November and comes at a time when other cities in B.C., such as Victoria, have adopted the top tier of a stringent provincial building code that will limit the greenhouse gas emissions of new buildings and effectively phase out most fossil-fuel use in them.

“By reverting to natural gas, [Vancouver] risks locking itself into a high-carbon infrastructure at a time when urgent climate action is needed,” Agar said.

The post ‘Natural’ gas ban backlash hits Vancouver appeared first on Corporate Knights.

Eco-right organizations such as the Conservative Climate Foundation and Citizens for Responsible Energy Solutions were set to hold a reception on Tuesday at a horticultural conservancy where members of the Conservative Climate Caucus will speak. But their concerns about a warming planet will likely go largely unnoticed by the most powerful elements of today’s Republican Party. And anything they say is bound to be drowned out by former president Donald Trump’s announcement Monday that he was picking Ohio Senator J.D. Vance as his running mate.

Vance, for his part, seems to be an embodiment of two important threads that have been pervasive in today’s GOP: limitless loyalty to Trump and an unwillingness to support policies to wean the United States off fossil fuels.

The Ohio senator’s name is more commonly associated with the former than the latter of these two concepts, but his connections to the fossil fuel industry run deep. Vance has been a supporter of expanding hydraulic fracking for gas in his state, which is the sixth largest in gas production. In the 2022 election, Vance’s campaign was among the top 20 recipients in the country of fossil fuel donations, according to the Ohio Capital Journal. And Vance’s personal investments are also heavily tied up in oil and gas. Financial disclosure forms he filed in 2022 show he owned between US$100,001 and $250,000 in a crude-oil-futures exchange-traded fund called K-1 Free Crude Oil Strategy ETF.

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Vance’s political rhetoric and actions have matched the state of his personal and campaign finances. In 2022, he said he was “skeptical of the idea that climate change is caused purely by man” and said the climate has been “changing for millennia.” He once said the climate crisis was “created” to “justify Democratic donors” and has criticized environmental, social and governance (ESG) investing as a “massive racket to enrich Wall Street.” Like his fellow Republicans, he has also opposed the Inflation Reduction Act, a law that has pumped more than US$12 billion into Ohio’s clean economy. And last year, he introduced a bill that, if passed, would repeal federal tax credits for electric vehicles and replace them with credits for gas-powered cars.

“Time and again, JD Vance has gone out of his way to minimize the very real climate crisis we face and cast doubts on the human behavior driving it,” Sierra Club executive director Ben Jealous said in a statement. “Now, Vance joins a ticket that has sought to sell out Appalachian communities by pushing for the expansion of dangerous fracking . . . as well as by seeking to defund vital Inflation Reduction Act investments that are targeted to support jobs in energy communities like the ones he claims to represent.”

J.D. Chameleon

Vance rose to prominence after Hillbilly Elegy, his 2016 memoir about his childhood in Ohio and his family’s Appalachian roots, became a popular bestseller and later a movie. In the book, he draws from his own experience to try to explain why some working-class parts of America are turning away from Democrats.

Once a vocal critic of Trump (having reportedly called him “America’s Hitler” in 2016), he ultimately apologized and fell in line when he started running for Senate in 2021 and needed the former president’s endorsement. Vance has undergone a similar evolution on climate policy. In 2020, he acknowledged the harms of climate change and said natural gas was not “the sort of thing that’s going to take us to a clean energy future.”

There was a time when Vance was considered a moderate voice, but the one-term senator has taken up the ultra-conservative mantra of Trump’s supporters, opposing measures that would enable access to abortion and provide greater rights to 2SLGBTQIA+ people.

Vance beat out two other fossil-fuel-friendly lawmakers on the shortlist: Florida Senator Marco Rubio and North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum.

A second Trump administration would implement policies that roll back progress on climate with or without J.D. Vance as vice-president. But his selection will add yet another politician with ties to the fossil fuel industry to Trump’s inner circle.

“Donald Trump was the worst president ever for clean air, clean water, and protecting a livable future,” Jealous said. “With the selection of JD Vance as his VP pick, that climate-denying legacy would only worsen in a second term. Voters should reject this ticket and the reckless policies it would bring with it.”

The post What Trump’s VP pick could mean for climate policy appeared first on Corporate Knights.

A growing number of video games, such as Horizon and Terra Nil, have themes or plots related to the climate crisis. Researchers say that the medium has huge potential to educate gamers and help galvanize them to take action on the greatest threat to humanity.

A recent study by researchers at Yale University shows that video game players are slightly more likely than the general public to view collective action on climate action positively, ­busting the stereotype that gamers are merely apathetic teenagers sitting in their parents’ basements. They’ve even been pushing the emissions-intensive gaming industry to clean up its act.

Given that there are more than three billion people playing video games in the world, whether on consoles, computers or smartphones, the medium offers a vast pool to target for communications professionals working in the climate space. “Games create engaging and immersive worlds. So they’re a really great way to bring people in to start that conversation about climate change,” says Jennifer Carman, one of the study’s authors and a deputy research manager with the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication.

The social aspect of video games (whether they’re played with other people online or in person) can help start conversations about things portrayed in games that are actually happening in the real world. And that social aspect can also help galvanize action.

This can be seen in the world of video game streamers (online personalities who broadcast themselves playing games online), where influencers such as Jimmy Donaldson (also known as MrBeast) and Mark Rober have spread the word about the climate crisis and used their platforms to fundraise for environmental causes. For Donaldson, that meant launching fundraising campaigns that have raised more than US$23 million for a tree-planting initiative called Arbor Day Foundation and more than US$30 million for Ocean Conservancy and The Ocean Cleanup.

Researchers say that players can also develop a feeling of control in games they don’t get from other mediums, as they make decisions that drive the narrative forward. “I think having that sense of agency in a game [and] looking at a real-world topic can give you the belief that you have made a difference in a game, and you can do that in the real world, too,” says Marina Psaros, a co-author of the study, who used to be the head of sustainability at Unity Technologies.

Video game studios have increasingly injected narratives about climate change into popular games. A separate Yale survey found that 22% of video game players surveyed had come across some kind of climate change–related content in games in the previous 12 months and that 63% of them said they feel a personal sense of responsibility to help tackle global warming. When it comes to taking action, 43% said they have refused to buy the products of companies that have opposed strong climate policies.

Pushing for corporate action

In turn, the industry is starting to take its own emissions more seriously. The data centres that support online gaming and the semiconductor chips used in video games eat up a lot of energy. In 2019, the gaming industry emitted an estimated 24 million tonnes of carbon dioxide in the United States alone – which was the carbon footprint of the entire nation of Mongolia that year.

Among the companies that have been working to lower their emissions is Epic Games. The company has made some changes in its popular game Fortnite that it says will reduce the global electricity use of the game by 200 megawatt hours per day. Many of the large tech companies that manufacture games and consoles, such as Microsoft, Apple and Google, have committed to reaching net-zero by 2030. Other companies have less ambitious targets. Sony has pledged to be net-zero by 2040, and Activision says it will reach that target by 2050.

While the industry’s carbon footprint is a work in progress, green themes are proliferating. So much so that the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) has recognized the power of video games as a communications tool to spread environmental messages. Every year since 2020, UNEP has held what it calls the Green Game Jam that challenges video game creators to inject a particular environmental theme into their games. The developers of popular smartphone games like Angry Birds, Boom Beach and even Pac-Man participated.

Carman says that it’s important for communications professionals not to get stuck on the traditional audiences for climate messaging and that video gaming can at the very least prompt people to talk about the climate crisis. “It can start those conversations that can prompt people to take action, and that’s what we want people to do,” she says.

The post Could the video game industry be key to levelling up on climate action? appeared first on Corporate Knights.

The presence of heavy industry was felt throughout Odense for decades. Its first shipyard opened in 1918. A four-lane highway – named after Danish industrialist Thomas B. Thrige – carved through the city centre, splitting it in two. 

This all started to change after the global financial crisis of 2007/2008. The crisis, coupled with international competition, led to the Maersk shipyard closing in 2012. But where other industrial towns started falling into disrepair, Odense experienced a rapid post-industrial transformation into a high-tech hub. And the secret to that metamorphosis partly involves two wheels. 

When heavy industry started to leave Odense, the city needed to reinvent itself with a new strategic vision. Elected officials wanted to draw a new type of industry: tech and robotics. They had to change the way the city thought about urban design and mobility so that car traffic flow wasn’t the top priority.

For Joost Nijhoff, the head of economic growth and tourism at the City of Odense, it was a given that Danish people cycled everywhere. But some of the tech companies he pitched Odense to asked whether the city had a subway system. With around 200,000 residents, that wasn’t something the city could deliver (although Odense does have a light-rail system now), but it did have superior cycling infrastructure. 

“It suddenly became an issue of ‘How is the bicycle infrastructure?’” he says. “Because they realized that cars are so expensive in Denmark that a family could not afford a second car. But what they can afford is an electric family cargo bike where you have two kids in front of you and maybe one at the back.” 

The Danish city, where 19% of trips are taken by bike, has long had superior cycling infrastructure compared to other parts of the world. In Paris, a city praised for its recent investments in bike infrastructure, just 11% of trips are done on bicycles. Odense has 560 kilometres of cycle lanes, as well as 65 tunnels and 125 bridges exclusively for cyclists. But it’s taken its commitment to sustainable transportation to another level. 

“We turned the hierarchy upside down,” says Peter Rahbæk Juel, the mayor of Odense. “Now we’re thinking what is the best [thing] to do . . . for having good conditions for pedestrians and people on bikes.”

It paid off being ambitious. You need some old-style courage to move your city in the right direction.

 

– Peter Rahbæk Juel, mayor of Odense

In recent years, the city redeveloped a chunk of its city centre and shut off car traffic to the Thomas B. Thrige roadway to build a new automobile-free district with bike lanes, squares, parks, retail and restaurants. Local leaders say these efforts have brought investment to the area and have helped make Odense a place where new industries can thrive, draw talent and retain it. “It’s part of what makes Odense attractive,” says Rahbæk Juel, who uses cycling as his primary means of transportation. “It’s a green city. It’s a city where you can breathe, you can live, and it’s a part of the lifestyle that you can go by bike.”

It’s hard not to feel like the city is ascending. In 2019, Meta, then Facebook, opened a data centre in Odense. American robotics company Teradyne has bought two Odense start-ups and is building a new facility to house them. In recent years, the city centre has come to life with an increase in cafés, bars and restaurants. And Odense, which was named after Odin, the Viking god of war, and was the birthplace of Hans Christian Andersen, has become a growing tourism destination, even making The New York Times’s 52 Places to Go list in 2023.

“It paid off being ambitious,” Rahbæk Juel says. “You need some old-style courage to move your city in the right direction.”

Could this happen in North America?

Being bike-friendly is only natural for a Danish city. During the global oil crisis of the 1970s, Denmark decided to make itself less dependent on foreign fossil-fuel producers by becoming a leading cycling nation. Any North American bike advocate would drool at the country’s cycling infrastructure. But even in car-centric North America, there’s a growing understanding among urban leaders that building out their bike infrastructure and making their cities more walkable helps attract investment and business. 

In 2013, at the opening of a new protected bike lane, Chicago’s then-mayor Rahm Emanuel declared that his city was becoming a tech hub thanks to the cycling infrastructure being built there. He drew a straight line between Chicago’s growing investments from the tech sector and its progress building more bike lanes. “You cannot be for a start-up, high-tech economy and not be pro-bike,” he said at the time. 

That sentiment has been true for National Landing, a Virginia neighbourhood just across the Potomac River from Washington, D.C., which Amazon chose as the location of its second headquarters, HQ2. The e-commerce giant opened its facility last summer with an indoor bike cage with 620 racks and two repair stations.

In 2017, Amazon announced it was planning to open a new corporate headquarters somewhere other than its original head offices in Seattle. The company released a request for proposals, inviting cities to pitch themselves, and in that document, Amazon asked cities to include information about bike lanes that commuting employees could use.

Local leaders in National Landing say the area’s existing cycling infrastructure, as well as commitments to invest further in active transportation, made the area particularly attractive to Amazon. (Of course, US$750 million of tax subsidies from the state of Virginia helped, too.) When Amazon chose National Landing, the area had 2.7 kilometres of protected bike lanes, which has grown to 4.5 kilometres (with more than 18 kilometres total). This may seem small when compared to Odense, but it’s not bad for a U.S. neighbourhood with only around 24,000 residents. More bike lanes are in the works, and the area also has a bike share with more than 20 stations.

Since the early 2000s, local governments have worked to transform the once car-centric place into a people-centred environment. Roughly 75% of trips taken in National Landing, which is also now home to Boeing and a Virginia Tech campus, are by modes of transportation that are not cars, such as bike, walking and public transit. 

“We knew that in order to accommodate growth and to attract both residents and employers, we would need to compete on place,” says Tracy Sayegh Gabriel, the executive director of the National Landing Business Improvement District. “One of the essential ingredients [that] workers, residents and visitors alike are seeking is highly walkable, bikeable and vibrant public realms and urban environments.” 

Michael Anderson, an urban policy analyst who wrote a report about how protected bike lanes helped urban economies boom in the United States after the great recession, says that the competition to attract economic investment nowadays is largely a competition to attract people. And for the last few decades, Anderson says, jobs have chased people rather than the other way around. “So to the extent that you can create a pleasant city to spend time in – one that’s built for human interaction, health and subjective well-being, among other things – you are also creating a place that will attract employers and investment,” he says. “Bike infrastructure isn’t the only ingredient in that recipe for a city that people want to live in, but it’s good at being one of the ingredients.”

Back in Odense, the local government is working to further cement its place as a modern green city where young people want to study, work and live. The city is striving to be carbon-neutral by 2030. For Rahbæk Juel, that means getting even more people riding bikes. “We are not there yet, but we have plans and we’re striving to be sustainable. It’s not just good for the climate,” he says. “It’s also good for the city if you can walk the talk on that narrative. I believe we are close to walking the talk in Odense . . . We have some steps on the road yet.”

Alex Robinson is the Ottawa-based deputy editor at Corporate Knights.

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Agriculture emits around 16 gigatons of greenhouse gases a year – about a third of the world’s total emissions. Animal farming alone is responsible for 19% of all emissions, according to a 2021 study (although estimates vary). Simply shifting diets to be less heavy on meat and dairy could reduce food-related emissions by 49%. And yet very limited progress has been made on the issue as most politicians steer clear of critiquing the carbon footprint of, well, steers.

Wading into this hot-button arena is an institution that has generally kept quiet on this front: a new paper by the World Bank lays out a roadmap for how the world can substantially reduce the emissions from food systems partly by redirecting the subsidies given to the meat and dairy industries.

“The narrative is clear: to protect our planet, we need to transform the way we produce and consume food,” writes Axel van Trotsenburg, a senior managing director for development policy and partnerships at the World Bank, in a forward to the paper.

The paper’s authors say that reallocating subsidies for meat and dairy toward lower-carbon plant-based alternatives is the most cost-effective way for high-income countries to reduce demand for meat and dairy products that are harming the planet.

Alternative burger companies like Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods have struggled to bring the price of their products down close to what consumers pay for actual meat. But such a shift in subsidies could potentially reverse that, making plant-based products the cheaper option.

“The full cost pricing of animal-sourced food to reflect its true planetary costs would make low-emission food options more competitive,” the report says.

The food system must be fixed because it is making the planet ill.

In the United States, the government provides US$38 billion a year in subsidies to meat and dairy. In 2021, the Canadian government allocated $1.7 billion in subsidies for animal agriculture.

The paper says the annual investments needed to transition food systems will also need to increase 18 times, to US$260 billion, to cut emissions in half by 2030 and keep the world on track to be net-zero by 2050. It recommends that high-income countries do more to help the food industry use renewable energy and give more financial and technical support to lower-income countries to help them adopt the same changes.

Benefits of a sustainable food system

In addition to cutting emissions, the health, economic and environmental benefits from such a transition could amount to US$4.3 trillion in 2030. The costs of the transformation are estimated to be less than half the amount the world currently spends on agricultural subsidies, the paper says.

The report also included chicken as a lower-emissions alternative to other types of meats, but climate advocates say this might send the wrong message. “I know there are different kinds of calculations between different kinds of meats,” Sini Eräjää, Greenpeace’s EU food campaigner, told Climate Home News, “[but] first and foremost, we need to change to more plant-based diets.”

The World Bank released the paper while countries party to the Paris Agreement are working to update their climate plans. But governments don’t need to wait until the plans are due in 2025 to start taking action.

“The food system must be fixed because it is making the planet ill and is a big slice of the climate change pie,” the report says. “There is action that can be taken now to make agrifood a bigger contributor to overcoming climate change and healing the planet. These actions are readily available and affordable.

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The move was one of the latest victories for the gas industry and its supporters, who observers say have been emboldened by a 2023 Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruling that rolled back the country’s first municipal gas ban, in Berkeley. Since the northern California city introduced its ban on gas hookups in new buildings in 2019, 25 states have adopted prohibitions on municipalities approving their own gas bans, according to S&P Global Commodity Insights.

The appeals court decision has had somewhat of a chilling effect in some cities and states, worried they may also face legal challenges. Soon after the decision, Palo Alto, which introduced its own gas ban in 2022, said it would no longer enforce it. Others followed suit, including Berkeley.

Earlier this year, the court refused to hear Berkeley’s appeal of the decision. At the time, the Biden administration said it could “cast a cloud of uncertainty over any health or safety law that may indirectly affect someone’s ability to use a product for which the federal government has issued an energy conservation standard.”

New York State is also facing a lawsuit by gas and construction industry groups for its restrictions on gas infrastructure in most new buildings.

But not everything is going the gas lobby’s way. Gas bans have continued to spread and evolve in other parts of the country. On the east coast, several Maryland counties are introducing changes to building codes to ensure that heating in new buildings is all-electric. And late last year, local lawmakers in Burlington, Vermont, approved new requirements that developers use low-carbon or renewable sources of energy to heat their buildings or pay a one-time carbon fee for their expected life-cycle emissions.

Climate advocates are now regrouping, considering other types of action that they hope will curb the use of natural gas in buildings, which along with the construction sector accounts for 37% of global greenhouse gases, according to the United Nations. One of the main components in most natural gas is methane – a potent, heat-trapping greenhouse gas. “Learning from Berkeley’s ill-fated experience, cities across California and the U.S. west have already introduced different rules focused on energy performance,” Alastair Iles, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, told The Guardian. “Cities can also set air pollution emission standards to favor electric appliances.”

Local leaders in California, who feel handcuffed by the appeals court decision, are trying to put pressure on Governor Gavin Newsom to implement state-wide electric building standards.

The idea is also spreading internationally. Last month, the European Parliament voted to approve new requirements that all new buildings be zero-emission starting in 2030.

In Canada, some cities in British Columbia, Victoria among them, have adopted a stringent provincial building code that will limit the greenhouse gas emissions of new buildings, effectively phasing out most fossil-fuel use. Come October, a ban will come into effect in Montreal on gas-powered heating systems, stoves and water heaters in most new buildings.

No municipalities in Ontario have implemented similar gas bans, but the province’s energy regulator gave Ottawa climate activists a win last year when it rejected Enbridge’s application to build a new gas pipeline in the city to replace an aging one. The regulator determined that repairing and retrofitting the existing pipeline would be sufficient at a time when the city is trying to wean itself off fossil fuels. Enbridge is looking to reopen its application, claiming it now has evidence to show that the old pipeline needs to be replaced.

When it comes to gas bans in the United States, it can sometimes feel like climate advocates take a step forward only to get shoved back three steps by the gas industry and its supporters. But local and state leaders in some of the most populous states in the country are finding creative ways to get around the roadblocks.

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“Plastic pollution? We have solutions,” the group chanted as it marched through downtown Ottawa to the convention hall where negotiations were about to begin on a global treaty to end plastic pollution.

Environmentalists were hopeful that the fourth of five rounds, which began two years ago in Uruguay, would make significant progress. But by the time negotiations ended late on the final night, that hope had dissolved.

“We were not close to having an international instrument that works to eliminate plastic pollution after having had a much-anticipated session here in Ottawa,” Elizabeth May, leader of the Green Party of Canada, tells Corporate Knights.

During eight days of negotiations, representatives from more than 170 countries convened to forge a legally binding treaty that will spell out how the world can end plastic pollution. Negotiators made little progress on the substance of the treaty but at least agreed to keep working in interim meetings before the next and final session in Busan, South Korea, in November.

“It isn’t that we didn’t make some progress, but if we’re serious about having an international convention to end plastic pollution by [the end of] 2024, the [interim] sessions really have to take off,” May says.

The United Nations estimates that the world makes around 400 million tonnes of plastic a year and that this will double by 2040 if left unchecked. In addition to wreaking havoc on marine ecosystems and making their way into human bodies, plastics are responsible for four times as much greenhouse gases as the airline industry, according to new research from the U.S. government.

To date, less than 10% of plastic produced has been recycled, a statistic that has led environmental organizations to call for a cap on plastic production. For decades, the petrochemical industry has pushed recycling as a solution to the plastics crisis despite knowing it wasn’t technically or economically feasible, according to a recent report by the Center for Climate Integrity.

“The industry is constantly putting forward proposals for false solutions that aren’t getting at the root cause of the plastic pollution crisis, from waste-to-energy, chemical recycling, recycled content and products, but maintaining business as usual on production,” says Sarah King, the head of Greenpeace Canada’s oceans and plastics campaign. “Industry will continue to find ways to keep the status quo.”

Last year at INC-3 in Nairobi, advocates blamed a small group of oil-producing states that included Iran, Saudi Arabia and Russia for bogging down progress with procedural issues. This year, there was an even larger industry presence, with 196 lobbyists from the fossil fuel and chemical sectors attending the talks, a 37% increase from INC-3 according to the Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL).

Advocates say it would be one thing if these lobbyists were on equal footing with other attendees. But several of them were part of state delegations, giving them access to closed-door negotiations. CIEL found that 16 petrochemical lobbyists were on nine different countries’ delegations, including four on Malaysia’s and three on Thailand’s.

Meanwhile, Indigenous delegates did not have a seat at the negotiating table. Representatives from Indigenous communities, such as the Aamjiwnaang First Nation in southwestern Ontario, wanted to share their experience as “front-line communities” that suffer because of their proximity to plastic-producing facilities.

“We demand that you listen to the voices of our people,” Suzanne Smoke, a representative of Society of Native Nations, told the rally on Parliament Hill before negotiations began. “We are no longer going to sacrifice our children and our future generations for what you call development and progress.”

The presence of the petrochemical industry was felt throughout Ottawa during the negotiations. A group called These Plastics peppered the city’s airport with pro-plastic ads. They had people walking around downtown with signs strapped to their backs, spreading their message that “these plastics save lives,” “reduce food waste” and “deliver water.”

As the lights went out at the Shaw Centre in Ottawa, concluding the treaty talks at INC-4 in late April, the United Nations Environment Programme sent reporters a press release that trumpeted “Road to Busan clear.” But before negotiators make it to INC-5 in South Korea, negotiators will have their work cut out for them at the interim talks.

Advocates fear that unless a group of 118 countries called the High Ambition Coalition, which is calling for stronger measures, steps up to drive the process, there is a risk that not much will change between now and the final hour in South Korea.

The road to Busan may be bumpy.

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As car ownership took off in the 1950s, urban planners and engineers designed streets and roads around automobile travel, allowing suburbs and sprawl to proliferate along highways. 

Many parts of Europe avoided this car-centric approach. The Netherlands, which was quite car-friendly in the 1960s, rethought its roads after more than 400 children died in car accidents in 1971 and widespread protests called on the government to “Stop de Kindermoord” – or stop the child murder. During the 1973 oil crisis, Denmark figured it was better to use transportation methods that reduced its reliance on oil-producing nations. Ever since, both countries’ cities have led the world in their cycling infrastructure.

A growing number of congested cities in North America are now trying to rethink their streets in similar ways to make them safer and more climate-friendly, but they’re having to undo decades of entrenched engineering practices and standards that favoured cars. Some blame John Forester, a Californian cycling advocate, for those engineering standards. In the 1970s, Forester fought against rules that were introduced in the town of Palo Alto, in Silicon Valley, that forced him to ride in protected bike lanes and on the sidewalk, banning him from sharing roads with cars. He became highly influential, mobilizing cyclists against separate bike lanes and publishing an engineering guide that argued that roads should be shared by drivers and cyclists.

“There’s no question that the John Forester effect on engineering standards has been huge. And those engineering standards are still in the process of being revised,” says Kay Teschke, a professor emeritus at the University of British Columbia who has done groundbreaking research on helmets and bike infrastructure. 

For decades after Forester’s efforts, much of the research around bike safety focused on helmet wearing and showed that, yes, if you’re in an accident while cycling, a helmet will lower your risk of head injury. But the sole focus on helmets neglected something studies later revealed: that proper bike infrastructure prevented cyclists from getting into those accidents in the first place. And research has also shown that a lack of separated bike lanes was the largest obstacle to people feeling safe cycling. 

“It’s a bit of a vicious circle,” Teschke says. “When you don’t have infrastructure, people don’t bike; they drive. And then the demand falls off for biking infrastructure. Kids don’t bike to school any more. Parents don’t bike. The whole thing compounds.”

Across the U.S. and Canada, the landscape for urban cycling is rapidly evolving. In some cities, like Montreal, things have shifted into high gear as holistic cycling networks with separate bike lanes are being built. In Washington, D.C., like a lot of North American cities, a combination of bureaucratic inertia and political pushback have kept cyclists in harm’s way. 

Like the legislative and vehicular congestion it’s known for, the progress of D.C.’s bike infrastructure has been slow when compared to international cities. So much so that of the G7 capitals in advocacy group PeopleForBikes’s 2023 rankings of the best cities for biking, Washington, D.C., ranked dead last. It came in 261st place overall in the ranking of more than 1,700 cities thanks to its dangerously disjointed bike lanes. Last year, 33 D.C. cyclists suffered major injuries in collisions, and three died. Cycling advocates admit that bike infrastructure has progressed a lot in the city over the last two decades, but its fragmented network of lanes is leaving cyclists exposed.

“By American city standards, D.C. is doing very well. By global standards . . . we have a long way to go,” says Colin Browne, director of communications for the Washington Area Bicyclist Association, an advocacy group that pushes for better cycling infrastructure. “There are a lot of places that you still can’t get to in a way that feels safe on a bike.”

D.C. has built approximately 167 kilometres of bike lanes, including just 39 kilometres of separated lanes. When the district looked to build a 2.5-kilometre separated bike lane on 9th Street, the project saw years of delays after a loud contingent of residents and business owners voiced concerns about losing parking spaces and the effects of bike lanes on their bottom lines. And cycling advocates are worried that a proposed project on Connecticut Avenue – a major thoroughfare that runs from suburban Maryland to downtown Washington, D.C. – will suffer the same delays.

“When they say the squeaky wheel gets the grease, they mean it,” says Elizabeth Kiker, executive director of the Washington Area Bicyclist Association. 

To counteract these forces, cycling advocates are organizing one-on-one conversations with business owners to explain the environmental, health and economic benefits of bike lanes. Getting support from within the business community is always a big step up, Browne says. And it’s hard to argue with the research: studies show that building bike lanes improves business in retail and restaurants and that taking one trip a day by bike rather than by car can lower your individual transportation-related carbon footprint by 67%.

When they say the squeaky wheel gets the grease, they mean it.

 

– Elizabeth Kiker, executive director, Washington Area Bicyclist Association

Advocates say policies that mandate separate bike lanes can help cut some of those arguments off at the pass. “It shouldn’t really be a debate at the start of every bike project – whether we’re going to [build bike infrastructure],” says Rebecca Davies, the city ratings program director for PeopleForBikes, which has released a legislative guide for lawmakers. “It should be about how we can [build bike infrastructure] in a way that best meets all of the needs of the community.” 

Mayor Muriel Bowser has helped spearhead a lot of the new cycling infrastructure in D.C., but advocates say her office has let bike-lane opponents stall important projects, such as the 9th Street one. 

Electing strong, consistent leaders who won’t let these kinds of arguments slow down bike infrastructure can be a huge part of the battle, say advocates, who point to cities like Montreal and Paris, where Mayor Anne Hidalgo’s government shut down a major road running along the River Seine to car traffic. 

“Without the political leadership, it’s hard to move quickly on anything,” Davies says. 

Lessons from Montreal

D.C.’s bike network stands in stark contrast to that of a city that has been an outlier in North America: Montreal. Quebec’s largest city boasts a network of more than 900 kilometres of bike lanes (717 kilometres of which are cleared of snow during the winter months and 218 kilometres of which are separated from car traffic) – and it’s building more. 

The city, which placed 57th in the PeopleForBikes ranking (and was the top-ranked large Canadian city), has had a bit of an active transportation renaissance in recent years under the leadership of Mayor Valérie Plante, whose Vision Vélo initiative plans to expand the bike network with an additional 200 kilometres of separated cycling lanes by 2027 and a network of high-capacity lanes called the Réseau Express Vélo.

Montreal built its first bike paths in the late 1970s, connecting a few parks. Cyclists later started pushing for paths that would take them to other places they needed to go. In the early 2000s, the city built westbound bike lanes on De Maisonneuve Boulevard in downtown Montreal. Simply having those paths made residents see what was possible, and from there, they wanted more. “You can see a progression in the bike infrastructure in Montreal that shows what can be done,” says Stéphane Blais, the director of research and consulting at Vélo Québec, an advocacy organization. 

It’s taken a while since its first bike paths for Montreal to build out its infrastructure, but things have been accelerating in recent years. And electing a staunchly pro-bike mayor has gone a long way in getting good bike infrastructure built. Advocates say that the city, under Plante’s leadership, refocused its efforts on bike infrastructure that is separate, rather than simply painting “sharrows” on the roads. The city is looking to expand popular bike lanes that opened on Saint Denis Street in 2020. 

You can see a progression in the bike infrastructure in Montreal that shows what can be done. 

 

– Stéphane Blais, Vélo Québec

Beyond electing the right leadership, bike advocates in Montreal say it’s important to have meaningful consultations on bike plans to figure out exactly what communities want. “So every time people are arguing that we’re taking away space for not the right reason or that we should put it on another street, we go back to these consultation nights and say we heard what people had to say, and this is what they wanted,” Blais says. 

It’s also vital to have officials go door-to-door to explain the new infrastructure that’s coming. But the point is not to restart the whole debate on whether the infrastructure is necessary. “You are not consulting people [at that stage] on whether we need a bike lane or not,” Blais says. “You’re consulting people on small issues that maybe the designer didn’t see.”

And rather than making the debate about bikes versus cars, Blais maintains that we should be talking about the fact that these kinds of projects simply provide more choice for how people can get around a city. 

Blais says that within three to six months of a bike lane being built, the anger tends to dissipate and people tend to see the benefits and forget what it was like before. 

Blais and many other Montreal residents now bike with their children down streets that they would never have imagined biking down just a few years ago. With any luck, that will also be the case for a growing number of Washington, D.C., residents and cities across North America as the bike infrastructure grows. 

“We’re really fortunate to live in this period of time when a lot of change is coming,” Blais says.

This story is part of the Sustainable Cities package in our Spring 2024 issue. 

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