It’s energy efficiency.

Energy efficiency is the cheapest source of new energy because every kilowatt-hour that I save on the grid is one that someone else can use.

Within the world of computers, the price-performance efficiency is even more pronounced. A 2023 iPhone 15 is 60,000 times cheaper than a 1976 Cray-1 supercomputer. It’s also 180,000 times more energy efficient and 5,000 times more powerful.

Kevin Weil, chief product officer at OpenAI, says that OpenAI’s models are improving 10-fold every year in energy efficiency. Deferring compute-heavy tasks such as AI training to times when data-centre energy use loads are light and assigning loads across many data centres – in essence adjusting when and where power is used – could have the same benefit of building 200 gigawatts of new capacity, argues Amory Lovins, one of the cofounders of the Rocky Mountain Institute, which is on a mission the transform global energy systems. That’s far more than enough to power all projected new data centres from existing utility assets.

AI driving efficiency in buildings

Computers aren’t the only arena where efficiency is making giant leaps. Buildings represent roughly 40% of global energy consumption and 75% of U.S. electricity use, making them an enormous target for efficiency improvements. Research published in Nature Communications found that AI applications could reduce building energy consumption by 8% to 19% by 2050, and up to 40% when combined with other policies such as retrofits and low-carbon power generation. Building efficiency can free up more electricity use than AI will ever require.

This creates a fascinating dynamic: while AI consumes energy, it also enables efficiency gains across the broader economy. The key is ensuring that AI deployment is strategic and coupled with robust measurement and verification protocols. AI for buildings isn’t theoretical; companies like BrainBox AI and others are already deploying systems that optimize HVAC (heating, ventilation, air conditioning), lighting, and energy storage in real time based on occupancy, weather and grid conditions.

“Artificial intelligence is the latest development in a long-standing megatrend in which information, analysis and innovation have been replacing the waste of energy and materials that characterize the overbuilt technologies of the 20th-century fossil economy,” notes Ralph Torrie, director of research at Corporate Knights. “Of course it uses electricity, but not nearly as much as it displaces.”

There are many examples of rapid, unexpected gains in energy efficiency. In 2021, all the blockchain-based cryptocurrencies combined used somewhere between 190 and 250 terawatt-hours of electricity, which is just about 1% of global electricity demand that year, or roughly the same as Taiwan’s consumption. Critics called blockchain technology fundamentally unsustainable.

Then in September 2022, Ethereum underwent a major transformation it called “The Merge,” shifting its consensus mechanism from “proof of work” to “proof of stake.” This cut the network’s energy consumption by 99.9%. The network’s annual energy use dropped from 80 terawatt-hours – the same amount of electricity that Austria or Finland uses in a year – to just 0.01 terawatt-hours.

Proof of stake achieved these gains by eliminating wasteful competition. Instead of miners racing to solve puzzles, Ethereum now relies on validators who are chosen to create new blocks and confirm transactions based on the amount of Ether (Ethereum’s native currency) they have staked as collateral. This method secures the network through financial commitment rather than raw computational power.

When real limits appear, innovation often accelerates in unexpected ways. Constraints can become the spark for new possibilities.

— Anthony Di Iorio, Ethereum co-founder

The shift to proof of stake also enhanced its security, scalability and environmental sustainability. This landmark move positioned Ethereum as a leader in sustainable blockchain innovation and demonstrated that large-scale decentralized systems can evolve to meet global energy and climate goals without compromising performance or decentralization.

Ethereum co-founder Anthony Di Iorio says that Ethereum’s massive efficiency gain is part of a broader pattern of disruptive innovation across technologies: “When real limits appear, innovation often accelerates in unexpected ways. Constraints can become the spark for new possibilities.”

For Di Iorio, the key lesson is that “fundamental architectural redesign beats incremental optimization. When you eliminate structural inefficiency rather than just making a system slightly less inefficient, you unlock orders-of-magnitude improvements.”

DeepSeek, a Chinese AI company, also showed that algorithmic innovation can cut costs – in its case by 97% even under severe hardware constraints. Meanwhile, SETI@home coordinated millions of personal computers to create a huge virtual supercomputer to power its search for extra terrestrial intelligence.

Better orchestration, multi-tenant GPU sharing (in which multiple users share computational resources) and carbon-aware scheduling could push AI infrastructure use from today’s 25% to 40% to 55% to 60%, effectively doubling capacity without building any new facilities.

“The question isn’t whether AI will consume catastrophic amounts of energy,” Di Iorio notes. “The question is whether we will apply what we’ve already learned about radical efficiency gains.” That means implementing the measurement and transparency frameworks that enable market discipline and establishing the policy guardrails that ensure that efficiency serves sustainability rather than just enabling endless expansion.

The path forward: Three essential actions

Three near-term actions could save 15 to 70 terawatt-hours by 2028:

Default to efficiency. Major cloud platforms and AI frameworks should make lean, right-sized models the default choice rather than requiring developers to opt in. When efficiency becomes the path of least resistance rather than an extra step, adoption accelerates dramatically.

Focus on hardware use. Better workload-management software can increase effective use from today’s 40% to 55 to 60%.

Mandate transparency. Energy consumption per task should be as visible as price and latency. When enterprises and governments demand kilowatt-hours-per-million-tokens disclosure in their AI procurement, providers will compete on efficiency. Market mechanisms work, but they require information.

The projections of AI’s looming energy crisis aren’t wrong if we assume nothing changes. But stasis isn’t how technology works when talented people face hard constraints with clear incentives to solve them.

Jim Harris is a #1 international bestselling author writing on AI, disruption and innovation. He speaks at 50+ events a year.

The post The single greatest tool for reducing greenhouse gas emissions is energy efficiency appeared first on Corporate Knights.

More than half the world’s population is under the age of 40, and yet this group is dramatically underrepresented in the decision-making bodies of corporations, governments and universities.

One exciting tool some companies are using to engage millennials and members of Gen Z in business decision-making is creating a shadow board composed of younger employees who review all decisions made by the board of directors or the executive committee.

Giving young people direct access to senior decision-makers can help an organization stay relevant in an increasingly digital world. Under the direction of CEO Marco Bizzarri and creative director Alessandro Michele, luxury fashion brand Gucci introduced a “shadow committee” of young Gucci employees in 2015, which helped them reinvent the 100-year-old fashion house into an ecologically conscious millennial favourite. Gucci experienced a 136% spike in sales by 2019. In comparison, the Harvard Business Review points out that sales of Prada, which did not have a shadow board, dropped 11.5% during the same period. Prada has since been playing catch-up.

French hotel company Accor, founded in 1967, set up its youth shadow board a few years ago to try to figure out how it could stay competitive with Airbnb. Using the shadow board’s advice, the multinational hospitality firm launched a millennial-focused hotel chain called Jo&Joe.

Transforming business schools

Dusty corporations aren’t the only ones that could benefit from the insights of the next generation of business leaders. McGill business school student Maxime Lakat and his colleagues have been campaigning for years to get more student representation on business schools’ governance committees to ensure that sustainability and the climate crisis are part of curricula.

“It’s not good enough to have a course on CSR [corporate social responsibility],” says Lakat, who is chair of the Canadian Business Youth Council for Sustainable Development. “Sustainability needs to be integrated into every department in business schools.”

Years of campaigning culminated in bringing together 65 youth-led organizations to create Our Future, Our Business, a manifesto for transforming Canadian business schools. One of the report’s recommendations is that business schools have at least 30% student representation on their governance committees.

Lakat and his colleagues have organized symposia, released reports and engaged supportive faculty and outside professional organizations – including Corporate Knights. Last year, Lakat was petitioning to have at least one youth seat on every corporate board. He addressed Corporate Knights’ annual Best 50 Corporate Citizens virtual gala, urging corporate leaders to do just that.

There hasn’t been much concrete progress when it comes to getting youth on corporate boards in Canada, but advocates say momentum is building toward this goal. Using the shadow board model, a youth-led organization called Student Energy is trying to facilitate youth advisory boards that help “to make forward-thinking recommendations on where companies need to go if they want to take meaningful action on climate, energy and equity,” says Meredith Adler, the executive director of Student Energy.

Many organizations have accelerated their digital transformation as a result of the pandemic and deepened their commitments to being socially and environmentally progressive. Engaging millennials and members of Gen Z in a meaningful way can help businesses – and business schools – stay culturally relevant and innovative in a rapidly evolving world.

Jim Harris is the author of the international bestseller Blindsided, which focuses on disruptive innovation.

The post Reverse mentoring: We need more young people on boards appeared first on Corporate Knights.

Historically, EVs have been about $12,000 more expensive than gas cars, in large part thanks to battery costs. But as batteries become cheaper every year, EV sales have been growing exponentially. The cost of lithium-ion batteries plummeted 89% from 2010 to 2020, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance. In 2016, batteries accounted for 48% of the cost of EVs. Today, that’s fallen to 26%.

It’s not the only trend driving the conventional car industry off a cliff.

Pandemic is fuelling “peak auto”

Other than spikes in leisure-wear sales, the pandemic has dramatically slowed consumer spending – and cars are the second largest capital expense for North American families, after housing. Seventy million U.S. households own two or more cars, and pre-pandemic, the average American worker spent five work weeks a year in traffic commuting to and from their jobs. Now that approximately 40% of the U.S. and Canadian labour force is working from home and corporate leaders and businesses have accepted that people can do so productively, some families will decide they don’t need a second car. This will have big implications for car sales.

While some studies have found that those who are still commuting often prefer driving solo to taking the subway or ride-hailing, KPMG projects that the work-from-home trend, along with more people shopping online, could take seven to 14 million cars off U.S. roads alone.

A growing number of pandemic-era commuters who don’t want to crowd into mass transit are going the micro-mobility route, fuelling sales of bikes, e-bikes and electric scooters – particularly in place of the staggering 60% of U.S. car trips that are less than five miles. Scooter-sharing companies Lime and Bird are the two fastest-growing firms in U.S. history – both reached $1 billion in market valuation within 12 months of launch. All scooter-sharing companies combined are set to exceed 500 million rides globally in 2021.

In Canada, Calgarians have taken almost two million rides on rented e-scooters. There are also pilot projects in Waterloo, Montreal, Edmonton, Ottawa and Kelowna. For a growing cohort of millennials debating whether to buy a car or use a scooter-sharing service at 35 cents a minute, the choice is pretty clear-cut.

Shifting national policies

National policies are already dramatically accelerating the adoption of EVs. For instance, Norway has the most aggressive goals globally, prohibiting the sale of any new fossil-fuel-powered cars by 2025. The target is already working. In December, 67% of all new cars sold in the country were pure battery electric vehicles, and when plug-in hybrid EVs are included, that figure jumps to 87%.

In November, Britain announced that it would ban the sale of new gas and diesel cars and vans from 2030 onward – five years earlier than previously promised.

In the U.S., California has banned the sale of new gas-powered cars and trucks by 2035. Considering that California has the fifth-largest economy in the world, the move sends a strong signal to American automakers. The signal would be even stronger if Canada and the incoming Biden administration instituted a North America–wide ban on new internal-combustion vehicle sales.

Closer to home, Quebec announced it will ban sales of new gas-powered cars from 2035. Montreal may do so by 2030. B.C. will follow suit in 2040.

Pension fund liabilities

Traditional car companies face another threat: pension fund liabilities. Legacy auto companies made historical commitments to retired employees. Many of these had defined benefits. For some car companies, these future commitments exceed the value of the pension fund. That gap between the value of the pension fund and the liabilities is called “unfunded liability.”

General Motors is one of the 10 U.S. companies with the largest pension-funding gaps relative to their market capitalizations. GM’s unfunded pension liability is a whopping US$14.4 billion according to S&P Global Ratings – that’s about 24% of the company’s current market worth. Ford’s is US$10.2 billion, or 30% of its market value, as of November 2020.

Their pension troubles aren’t surprising if you track the market cap of GM, Ford and Fiat Chrysler (FCA). Even if you combined the market value of these three legacy automakers and multiplied by six, it would still be less than the value of Tesla, at US$717 billion as of December 2020.

Total cost of ownership

Electric cars are not only becoming cheaper to buy; they’re also cheaper to drive and have serviced. While the traditional gas car has more than 2,000 moving parts, an EV has just 20, which means there are far fewer ways that an EV can break down. Maintenance costs for an EV are a stunning 50 to 70% less than for a gas car. Similarly, fuel costs for an EV are roughly 70% less, depending on the electricity rates in your province or territory.

For Canadians, EVs will eventually be cheaper to insure, too. Since Teslas come equipped with a number of autonomous safety features and have been found to have 85% fewer accidents per million miles travelled compared to cars with no autonomous features, Tesla is offering policies to California Tesla owners at 20 to 30% less than traditional insurance companies. The company plans to expand its insurance to other U.S. states in the future.

Autopilot overtakes gas cars

ARK Invest predicts the rise of autonomous EV fleets by 2024. Think Uber and Lyft but green and without a driver. The predicted cost of transportation will plummet from the 70 cents (U.S.) per mile car owners pay to just 25 cents per mile – that’s a two-thirds cost reduction. Who is going to buy a new car when they can get around effectively with “mobility as a service” (MaaS) for a third of the cost?

Traditional car companies are facing death by a thousand cuts: the climate crisis, the fall of fossil fuels, electrification, the rise of autonomous EV fleets, Tesla, legacy pension liabilities, shifting mandated national policies, and dampened demand for autos in general. According to Cathie Wood, ARK’s founder and chief investment officer, EV sales will grow nearly 20-fold, from 1.8 million in 2019 to 35 million, or 40% of total global auto sales, in the next six years. I predict that two major global car companies will cease to exist by the end of 2025. They will either go bankrupt or merge – as did Fiat Chrysler, which in December got EU approval to merge with Peugeot.

In the U.S., the switch from horse-drawn carriage to car was swift. In 1910, only 11% of passenger miles were by car; by 1920, it was 81%. Expect the same swift shift from fossil-fuel-powered cars to EVs. The demise of traditional auto firms will come far faster than we imagine.

Jim Harris is the author of the international bestseller Blindsided, which focuses on disruptive innovation.

The post The top trends killing the auto industry appeared first on Corporate Knights.

He wove together the understanding of how food builds bridges between farmers and cities, how food is a beautiful way to build community and understanding between cultures.

On Twitter, Wayne’s account was the second most influential in the world for local food after that of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. He spoke at UN panels, European Union symposia and food conferences throughout the world. He drew attention to the links between food and sustainability and highlighted how a local food policy is a powerful economic development strategy. Good food is essential for good health.

I met Wayne in the early 1990s when I had a radio show on CIUT – the radio station for the University of Toronto and the broader Toronto community. I invited him onto the show, which was called Songs of Hope. There wasn’t actually any music on the show – the title was metaphorical. It focused on environmentalists who were making the world better. His infectious humour, deep curiosity and intelligence made him one of my favourite guests and, later, one of my best friends.

I began my political career as a Progressive Conservative and Wayne began his as a Trotskyist. Those profound differences didn’t stop us from bonding and both becoming Greens. That was one of his great strengths: he was deeply and genuinely interested in other people’s perspectives, experiences and insights. He was a life-long learner.

Lady Randolph Churchill – Winston Churchill’s mother – once said, “When I left the dining room after sitting next to Gladstone, I thought he was the cleverest man in England. But when I sat next to Disraeli, I left feeling that I was the cleverest woman.”

This is exactly what Wayne did and how he made you feel.

“Radical happyist”

Wayne was a “radical happyist.” It’s a term he and I began talking about as he was dying of stage 4 acute myeloid leukemia (AML). The philosophy of a radical happyist is simple: it’s about living with joy in the moment.

There’s an old story about Buddha dipping his finger in honey, then licking it and smiling. Then Buddha dips his finger in vinegar and licks it and smiles. Buddha was a radical happyist. Of course, during COVID nobody’s allowed to dip their finger into anything and lick it. Restaurants are closed and the buffet is dead. So how can you be a radical happyist amid the pandemic?

Taking joy in everyday life is the central tenet of radical happyism. When we revel in peace, joy and wonder in our inner world, the outer world is amazing: we see its beauty, savour its delicious tastes and celebrate its delights. Wayne modelled radical happyism throughout his life, and it really shone through when he was dying.

He took great joy in spending time with Lori (his wife), Anika and Jaime (his daughters) and Dorothy (his granddaughter), and of course with his very wide circle of friends, colleagues and foodies from around the world.

Some people don’t want anyone to know when they are ill or dying, then when they die, everyone is surprised and sad. This was not Wayne’s way.

Lori cooked up a plan to send weekly updates to a long list of friends on how Wayne was doing. Responding to the updates, people emailed and texted Wayne. In the hospital his smartphone frequently ran out of juice. Rather than being alone, Wayne was connected. He was connected to his community. He was dying with integrity, inclusivity, grace and a lusty appetite for life. He let people know how much they meant to him.

A lifetime of building connection and community boomeranged back when he was ill. One late afternoon, for example, when he was recovering at home, a local magician came over and held a magic show in Wayne’s driveway. Neighbours ooo-ed and ah-ed, laughed and clapped, as they sat in their socially distanced lawn chairs outside while Wayne presided from the porch. It was magic in every way. Wayne’s infectious personality could corral a city block, and it did.

What I’ll remember most about Wayne is always laughing when we were together. Often Wayne and Lori, my spouse Lee-Anne and I would go out to dinner. On a number of occasions, we were threatened with ejection for laughing too loud. There was no one who made the threat of getting bounced from a restaurant more fun than Wayne!

One day, sitting on a bench in front of a Queen Street coffee shop in the Beaches, both of us unshaven and a little bleary-eyed, we jokingly posed the question “Would a passerby realize that we’re bestselling authors or just think we’re two homeless guys?” Wayne, of course, took it further, saying that if the U.S. witness protection program really wanted to hide someone, they’d simply create a new identity as a Canadian bestselling author so the chances of them being discovered would be much lower. In everything he did, he pushed to the edges of joy and laughter.

So I celebrate the life of Wayne Roberts – a radical happyist.

ChocoSol founder, Michael Sacco, remembers Wayne Roberts

Ten years ago, Wayne Roberts came to visit our eco-chocolate production factory in Toronto, after a visit to Mexico with me to visit Indigenous cacao growers. While giving him a tour I talked about ChocoSol’s attempts to reach “zero waste” and “zero emissions” in our factory design. He replied, saying, “That’s good but a bit unrealistic, and too much of an engineering approach. You need instead to think cradle-to-cradle – or, as I like to put it, from farm to fart.” That little tidbit of wisdom and humour transformed how I understood waste, soil-making, Indigenous cradle-to-cradle forest gardens, and the relationship between soil and fruits and farmers’ markets.

I will be planting a peach and elderberry grove in his honour. While we prepare the grove, we grieve the loss of a food-policy actionist leader, a terrific friend and mentor, and a loving husband, father, grandfather and godfather to my children. There will never be another quite like him in our lifetimes.

Carrying that love and gratitude with us, and embodying it in a soil mound for a little forest orchard and sacred grove, is an apt and poetic way to continue to have Wayne’s spirit feed and inspire us all.

He was always the life of the party. His life and work is the fertile social compost out of which so many beautiful initiatives have arisen and are fed now, and will be fed for seven generations to come.

Wayne Roberts was like a father to me, but to all of us in the good food community he was an elder amongst elders. Wayne Roberts served a purpose so much greater than his own interests: he served the common good of all those who would live a good and dignified life. His focus on food was a way to celebrate this love for humanity and all beings.

Neither an organiser, nor activist, nor policy wonk, nor ideas man alone, Wayne’s passion made him a rare breed of human, leading the way by writing, inspiring, clarifying, embodying, organizing and, finally, celebrating. Let us all lift a glass at every harvest feast in memory of our beloved Wayne and savour some great bad jokes in his honour.

The post Remembering food policy writer Wayne Roberts: A radical happyist appeared first on Corporate Knights.

By 2022, electric vehicles (EVs) will become cheaper to buy than gas cars. EVs are already cheaper on operating cost and maintenance cost. The electricity to power EVs costs 80% less than the gas to power a traditional car and electric car maintenance costs are 80% lower. A typical gas powered car has 2,000 moving parts, while an EV has 20. With thousands of fewer parts and no oil changes, there’s very little maintenance required for EVs.

Plummeting prices for EV batteries

The largest cost of an EV has historically been the battery but battery prices are plummeting, having fallen by more than 90% since 2010, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF).

In 2017 BNEF predicted that by 2026 EVs would be cheaper to buy than the average gas car in North America.

But battery prices have been falling so fast, that BNEF now predicts that cross over will happen in 2022.

Catherine Wood, CEO of New York based investment manager ARK, forecasts that the cross over will happen in 2021, and that by 2025 inexpensive electric vehicles in the US will be up to $11,000 cheaper compared to a gas powered Toyota Camry.

Who is going to buy a traditional gas car when an EV is cheaper to buy, cheaper to run and cheaper to maintain?

Rise of Mobility as a Service (MaaS)

Using Uber or Lyft is already cheaper than owning a car for 25% of Americans, especially for those living in dense urban areas and people traveling fewer than the average 13,000 miles per year (in Canada the average distance traveled is 15,200 kilometers).

The cost of personal travel was $1.70 per mile in 1871 by horse drawn carriage. The cost fell to 70 cents per mile by car and remained constant for 100 years when adjusted for inflation.

Once we have autonomous fleets (including autonomous Uber and Lyft cars), the cost will plummet to just 26 cents a mile. At that point who’s going to want to buy an expensive gas clunker when they can get anywhere they want to go for a third of the price?

Micro Mobility

Finally micro mobility options will help to kill the traditional gas car. A staggering 60% of traditional car trips in the US are less than five miles. Bike and scooter sharing – which has taken off – provides far low cost solutions for short trips.

In 2018, shared electric scooters firms Bird and Lime became the fastest ever US companies to reach billion dollar valuations – each achieving this milestone within a year of inception. Shared electric scooters provided 45.8% of all shared micro mobility trips in 2018, just one year after they emerged on the market.

Source: TechCrunch & NACTO

2019 Reality Check

These trends are not being felt by traditional car companies yet – for the fifth consecutive year, U.S. car sales topped 17 million in 2019.  (Although GM’s 2019 sales are down 2.3% from 2018 and Ford’s are down 3%.)

While ride sharing like Uber and Lyft are cheaper than owning a car for a portion of the population, the overall number of cars on U.S. roads is increasing. Traffic congestion in most U.S. cities is getting worse, not better. Further, some studies have found that public transit use has been decreasing in cities where Uber and Lyft are popular. Because of these counterintuitive consequences, traditional transportation experts may be tempted to dismiss or downplay how transformational the trends will be.

But some of those consequences may actually lead to further transformation: worsening traffic in cities will further drive explosive use of scooters in shared mobility for short trips.

Here’s a staggering stat that should tell you which way the wind is blowing: Tesla is valued at more than General Motors and Ford combined as of February 2019. To me, this highlights how profound the coming shift will be.

Final prediction

The death of the traditional gas-powered automobile will be driven by three trends: EVs, the rise of autonomous vehicles and mobility as a service and the rapid rise of micro mobility solutions like shared electric scooters.

This also spells the end for most traditional car companies. I predict that two of the world’s major car companies will go bankrupt in the next five years.

Jim Harris is the author of the Blindsided which focuses on disruptive innovation. It is published in 80 countries worldwide and is a #1 international bestseller. You can follow him on Twitter @JimHarris or email him at jim (at) jimharris.com.

The post Why Detroit automakers are zombies appeared first on Corporate Knights.