Most of the world’s nations signed on to the Paris Agreement, promising to reduce their carbon emissions, but so far nobody has done very much. It’s hard when you have economies based on digging up fossil fuels and then manufacturing stuff that runs on them, emitting carbon at every step of the way. 

It’s harder when everyone wants more stuff, and the jobs all depend on us buying it. So, the only strategy anyone can think of is to produce more carbon-efficient stuff, to build electric cars instead of gasoline-powered, to burn natural gas instead of coal, to make more wind turbines and solar panels, and to dream of nuclear reactors, carbon capture and storage, and hydrogen.

This was actually working, to a degree: pre-pandemic, the rate of increase in carbon emissions was slightly less than the growth of the world’s economies. But even with all that greening going on, carbon emissions were still increasing by 1.3% on average, while the global economy expanded by about 3%.

And in 2019, global greenhouse gas emissions from all sources still reached a record high of 52.4 gigatonnes of CO2e. (The e stands for equivalents— other gases like methane or fluorocarbon refrigerants, some of which have many thousands of times the global warming potential of CO2.) When the economy booms, so do emissions.

The world loves growth, and nobody wants to see an economic seizure like we had during the pandemic happen again. Governments have been pouring vast sums into cranking up the economic engines, encouraging us to buy more stuff and more services, while almost completely ignoring the fact that to keep under a temperature rise of 1.5 degrees, we have to reduce our carbon emissions budget to 25 gigatonnes of CO2e by 2030, less than half of what we emitted in 2019.

Norman Mailer wrote, “There was that law of life, so cruel and so just, that one must grow or else pay more for remaining the same.” Growth is the law of life, and the engine of growth runs on fossil fuels.

If we have any chance of getting close to the carbon budget for 2030, we have to change the way we think about growth. We have to stop thinking about production, the making of what everyone is selling, and start thinking about consumption, what we are buying.

We have to stop thinking about efficiency, making something slightly better, and start thinking about sufficiency: what do we really need?

The premise of this book, and the research it is based on, is that we are all collectively responsible for reducing our carbon emissions to keep under that 1.5-degree ceiling. We have that carbon budget set in Paris, and if you divide it by the number of people on Earth, we have a personal carbon allocation or budget target of “lifestyle emissions,” those emissions that we can control, of about 2.5 tonnes per person, per year by 2030. Getting by on this is what we are calling the 1.5-degree lifestyle.

But what is living on 2.5 tonnes of carbon actually like? How do you measure it? How much does individual consumption matter? These are some of the questions that this book will try to answer.

We will try and look at the carbon cost of everything that we do in our lives to help people make choices about what makes sense, what’s worth trying to change, and what isn’t. It’s a model that not only can influence our personal lives but also can guide policy, from urban planning to agriculture.

For many people, lifestyle carbon emissions are baked into the way we live and very hard to change without concomitant societal and environmental changes; our developed Western world seems almost designed to emit carbon. We are also creatures of habits that are difficult to shake. However, many habits changed in the course of the COVID-19 pandemic. It was perhaps not the best time to start this journey; much of the planet was now living a low-carbon lifestyle whether they wanted to or not.

On the other hand, it may be the perfect time for changes. We can collectively work for system change, but also for individual change, a 1.5-degree lifestyle. It is based on living within a tight carbon budget, but if one makes the right choices, it is sufficient, and there is enough to go around for everyone.

***

Of course, it requires more than individual action; it requires political action, regulation, and education. Perhaps the best example is the campaign against smoking, where we saw what happens when individuals, organizations, and government work together. Smoking was promoted by the industry, who buried information about its safety and owned the politicians and fought every change. They hired experts and even doctors to challenge the evidence and deny that smoking was harmful. They had a real advantage in that the product they were selling was physically addictive. However, eventually, in the face of all the evidence, the world changed. 

Forty years ago, almost everyone smoked, it was socially acceptable, and it happened everywhere. Governments applied education, regulation, and taxes. There was a lot of social shaming and stigmatizing happening too; in 1988, medical historian Allan Brandt wrote, “An emblem of attraction has become repulsive; a mark of sociability has become deviant; a public behavior now is virtually private.” Instead of virtue-signalling, we had vice-signalling. 

But this shift also took a great deal of individual determination and sacrifice. You can talk to almost anyone who was addicted and has given up smoking, and they will tell you that it was the hardest thing they have ever done. 

Fossil fuels are the new cigarettes. Their consumption has become a social marker; look at the role pickup trucks played in the 2020 American election. Like cigarettes, it is the secondhand externalized effects that are the motivators for action; people cared less when smokers were just killing themselves than they did when secondhand smoke became an issue. I wonder if at some point the big obnoxious pickup truck won’t be as rare as smokers have become. 

Lloyd Alter is design editor for Treehugger.com and lectures on sustainable design at Ryerson School of Interior Design.

The post Living the 1.5 Degree Lifestyle appeared first on Corporate Knights.

However, numbers are the biggest problem with this book, starting with the first sentence: “There are two numbers you need to know about climate change. The first is 51 billion. The other is zero.” Fifty-one billion was the number of tonnes of CO2 from human activity added to the atmosphere in 2019; zero emissions are what Gates says we have to aim for to avoid the worst effects of climate change. But Gates says we still need concrete, fertilizer and natural-gas power plants (others think there are solutions for all three of these, but that’s another story), so he calls for “near net-zero,” where carbon dioxide is removed from the atmosphere with carbon-capture devices, by reducing carbon in production processes, or through some form of offsetting.

None of these exist at scale at this time, but hey, don’t worry, Bill is on it: “I’m also a technophile. Show me a problem, and I’ll look for technology to fix it.” He has put a bit of his money where his mouth is, investing more than a billion dollars in everything from low-carbon cement and steel to faux meat, and several-hundred-million dollars in next-generation nukes.

The second problematic pair of numbers in Gates’s book are 2030 and 2050. Both are targets set in the Paris Agreement; to keep the rise in global average temperature below 1.5°C at the end of the century, we have to reduce emissions by about 50% by 2030 and to about zero by 2050. Gates does not believe that 2030 is realistic and thinks aiming for it might even be counterproductive. “Why? Because the things we’d do to get small reductions by 2030 are radically different from the things we’d do to get to zero by 2050. They’re really two different pathways, with different measures of success, and we have to choose between them.”

The 2030 pathway would mean starting now with the technology we have, which might take us 80% of the way. But Gates says we should be thinking big and using the time to plan for “the big technological changes that would ensure long-term success.” There is some logic to his worry about “lock-in” with investments in problematic “bridge fuels” like natural gas, when his strategy is to go zero-carbon with renewables and nuclear power, electrifying everything, and then using carbon capture to pick the remaining CO2 out of the air and then store it somehow.

The problem with these strategies is time, given another big number: 570 billion tonnes. That’s the estimate by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change back in 2018 of the total quantity of CO2 that can be added to the atmosphere if we are going to have a good chance of staying under 1.5° warming. Divide that by Bill Gates’s 51 billion tonnes and we run out of headroom before 2030, and it’s why every single molecule of CO2 emitted now matters; if we keep pushing off making changes, then his new technology is going to have to do an awful lot of CO2 sucking.

The second, bigger problem with a 2050 target is what futurist Alex Steffen calls “predatory delay.” It lets Toronto Mayor John Tory pour a billion dollars of concrete into the Gardiner Expressway or Ontario Premier Doug Ford push a highway through the greenbelt because “don’t worry, we will have electric cars.” It lets Jason Kenney and Justin Trudeau keep boiling rocks in Alberta because “don’t worry, we will have a hydrogen economy.” It lets Gates keep flying his private jet because he will be able to buy sustainable fuel. It lets us wait for some deus ex machina to drop out of the sky and save us, instead of actually giving anything up or making changes in our lives or economies now.

Notwithstanding these doubts, there is much to admire about Bill Gates. In an era of what Michael Mann calls “doom and gloomism,” he is positive, upbeat and optimistic. He really does believe that we can invent our way out of this and go from 51 billion to zero, instead of starting tomorrow with the renewable and storage technology that we have now. The problem is that we have run out of time, and the numbers don’t add up.

Lloyd Alter is design editor for Treehugger.com and author of the upcoming book Living the 1.5 Degree Lifestyle.

The post Bill Gates’s climate fixes don’t add up appeared first on Corporate Knights.

Now it’s 2015. Gasoline is even cheaper and the low price of oil is actually encouraging economic growth, at least in some places. As Physicist Niels Bohr noted, “Prediction is very difficult, especially if it’s about the future.”

This hasn’t stopped Rubin. He’s back with his latest book The Carbon Bubble, setting himself up like Charlie Brown coming at Lucy holding the football with another analysis of where we are going. One has to ask: Is he going to hit the football or end up flat on his back?

Rubin follows the radical changes that have transformed the North American oil scene, and have turned the world upside down. Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper put all his chips into the Alberta oil sands at the cost of Eastern Canada’s manufacturing sector, which lost thousands of jobs due to the soaring petrodollar. But most of the oil is trapped there with nowhere to go; the Keystone XL pipeline is languishing and pipelines going east and west are being fought against tooth and nail. As opportunity calls, the railways turn their tracks into stand-in pipelines, moving thousands of old single-walled tank cars full of petroleum through the hearts of cities and towns. What could possibly go wrong?

Then Harper’s bet on Alberta goes totally south – literally – when hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, turns America once again into an oil and gas superpower. Suddenly, the price of oil is way below the cost of steaming it out of the rocks of Alberta. Rubin lays all this out in detail.

Ten years ago, when he was CIBC chief economist, Rubin wrote: “You know you are at the bottom of the ninth when you are schlepping a tonne of sand to get a barrel of oil.” This is truer now than it ever was. It just takes too much work, too much energy and creates too much carbon dioxide to try and boil oil out of dirt and rock.

Changes affecting the oil industry are happening so fast that Rubin can’t keep up, as he notes in his conclusion. “I’ve spent the better part of the editing process [of this book] changing verb tenses from future to present.”

Sometimes things slip through. Take this sentence in his chapter on the Alberta economy and troubles in the oil sands. “If I were Jim Prentice, I’d be giving some serious thought to Plan B.” Prentice, who was Alberta’s premier at the time Rubin wrote that chapter, has since been turfed by Alberta voters. Even Rubin could not have imagined that citizens had their own Plan B; that shortly after his book came out Albertans would elect a left-leaning NDP government in place of a Conservative Party that ruled for 44 consecutive years.

But Rubin makes clear it’s not all doom and gloom for Canada. The carbon bubble might be bursting, but other opportunities are opening up thanks to warmer temperatures. The prairies have long been Canada’s breadbasket, but as the seasons get longer, it may well switch to more profitable corn crops, the mainstay of the manufactured food industry.

Canada’s water, half being carelessly wasted as it runs into the Arctic or Hudson’s Bay, could be re-routed and sold to California, says Rubin. Or it could be converted to electricity. “Harnessing the incredible kinetic power generated by the movement of the country’s running surface water is yet another way in which Canada can capitalize on its most important resource,” he writes.

Given Canada’s water resources and expected changes to its climate, Rubin suggests the country return to its agricultural roots.

“In tomorrow’s world, a time of climate change and ever-tightening restrictions on carbon emissions, Canada stands a much better chance of becoming an agricultural superpower than it ever had of becoming an energy superpower.”

Fundamentally, from exporting water and hydropower to growing corn and shipping it through the Arctic, Rubin is suggesting that Canada take advantage of the benefits climate change could bring it at the expense of America, which will need water, food and low-carbon electricity.

Some will argue that Canada won’t do so well in a warming world. Others might complain that Canadians should aspire to be more than just hewers of wood and drawers of water. What’s certain is change isn’t just coming – it’s happening, so quickly that the book publishing cycle can’t keep up.

The post When the carbon bubble bursts appeared first on Corporate Knights.

That’s a lot of meat.

In Cowed, Denis Hayes, a prominent environmentalist who coordinated the first Earth Day in 1970, along with his wife Gail Boyer Hayes, an environmental lawyer, tell the story of that meat.

It’s not a horror story like so many anti-meat books, designed to scare you into vegetarianism. Both Mr. and Mrs. are rather fond of cows. Their aim, instead, is to convince the reader to eat less red meat and pay more for it. They take us on a generally pleasant tour of the cow scene, laying out their goals in the introduction:

“Our proposal is simple. It does not require civil disobedience, mass marches or expensive lawsuits. All it requires is that enough like-minded people seek out organic dairy products and grass-fed-and-finished beef. Most people can do this without busting their budgets by reducing their beef and dairy consumption to levels that are better for their health.”

First, they have to explain why. The number of cows out there is staggering – there are 93 million in America alone, which works out to roughly 55 million metric tonnes of cow.

Having fewer of them certainly would be a good thing for the environment. Eating a pound of beef, after all, has a greater climate impact than burning a gallon of gasoline. From the deforestation caused by the clearing of farmland for feed crops to the methane that comes from cow burps, livestock account for more than 14 per cent of anthropogenic GHGs. It also takes 3,280 litres of water to create a pound of grain-fed beef.

As Canadian author and scientist Vaclav Smil has noted, “few economic endeavors are as water-intensive as meat production in general and cattle feeding in particular.”

Cow factories – also known as concentrated animal feeding operations, or CAFOs – are environmental disasters. Cows eat a hundred pounds of feed per day and poop out almost as much. That waste is often pumped into sewage lagoons, which become giant lakes of contaminated water.

The crowded cows are also dosed with antibiotics that go right though them into the lagoons and into the water supply. In 2006, E. coli bacteria from cows got into several California vegetable farms, causing hundreds to get sick – and three actually died. Overall, the business is built on government subsidies and hidden costs as they relate to pollution, public health, loss of property value and environmental degradation.

Surprisingly, 42 per cent of cow meat is ground into hamburger, which opens up a whole new world of opportunity for adulteration and contamination. If it doesn’t sicken us quickly, it will kill us slowly, according to a Harvard study, which found that “people who eat more red meat have a significantly greater chance of dying from all causes.”

But really, the authors like cows, noting that “humans could survive without cows, but our lives would be poorer for it.” They visit contented cows on small farms and get to know them by name. It’s all very bucolic as we read about Tory and Taffy and Tufu and how they happily stroll up to their milking machines and nibble on organic treats. Author Vanessa Farquharson once called this “happy meat.”

In the Okanagan Valley, the cows are really happy. They get a litre of red wine each day. This produces more flavorful and better-textured meat. One dairy in Oregon actually supplies its cows with waterbeds, which cut down on conventional bedding costs and make the cows less stressed.

Could we all eat happy meat from happy cows? Sure, but industry and consumers would have to make some big changes. The authors propose a world where cows live in herds no larger than the farm has acreage for growing feed. That same land would have to sustainably absorb whatever cow poop is produced. “The end of feedlots will mean the end of cheap grocery store beef,” they write. “Beef will become a special food, served less often or in smaller portions… to be savored.”

They suggest that if we cut our consumption of meat and dairy in half, and only eat happy meat, “we can reduce pollution, global warming, medical costs, animal cruelty, loss of soil, loss of diversity, and germs resistant to antibiotics, while increasing the amount of land and water available for other uses.”

That doesn’t sound unreasonable.

The post For the love of cows appeared first on Corporate Knights.

OMG. Fiction. I don’t do fiction. Self-published. Kindle. About The Most Boring Subject In The World, carbon trading. Just kill me now. But then I look, and it is only 306 pages and costs all of $3.71. And I think, I’m man enough for this. I hit the Amazon one-touch order button, open my Retina-screened sepia toned iPad and start reading. It’s not that bad. Short, declarative Hemingwayish sentences. Cardboard characters, albeit FSC-certified cardboard. Perhaps it’s a candidate for the Literary Review’s Bad Sex in Fiction Award.

But there is a story here. It’s about Emil Pfeffer, who is, don’t hang up, the Director of the Integrity Unit of the United Nations Global Carbon Market Organization (GCMO), “a supervisory body, it oversees the operation of the carbon market; conducts research and analysis; and makes information available to governments so as to help the market work better.”

I am on page six when I read this and want to kill my editor. But wait, Emil starts explaining what he does, and I start learning stuff, like what carbon trading actually is, how the system might work, and how it might be monitored. Oh, and why it’s important.

Reality is, when there is a price on carbon, when it is being traded, there is going to be abuse and there is going to be cheating and we are going to need people keeping things honest. And that’s what gets our hero Emil arrested in Port Moseby, Papua New Guinea (PNG), almost blown up in Frankfurt, drugged in Zurich and mugged in Stuttgart, as the forces of evil try to stop him from figuring out what is going on in the so-called carbon sink-protected forests of PNG. It’s exciting.

There’s sex, cannibalism, drugs and a whole lot of money floating around in this little book, but there are also a lot of questions. Have I just got a relatively painless education in how carbon trading works? I certainly know more than I did, but it doesn’t inspire confidence in the concept.

Five years ago many of us would buy carbon offsets, paying to plant trees to compensate for the CO2 produced during our plane flights. I suspect not many of us do anymore, after seeing so many stories about how carbon offsets really don’t work well.

Carbon Black is a novel built around the premise that nations are promising to prevent deforestation through carbon trading, and yet evil and greedy forces are taking the money and destroying the forests anyway.

Notwithstanding the fact that our hero is a UN-appointed bureaucrat with occasionally fancy footwork and sharp elbows, I am not convinced a whole lot of carbon is being sequestered. It doesn’t inspire confidence in the integrity of the system.

The author, Declan Milling, “has over 30 years experience practising as an environmental lawyer” and a background in environmental science. Working in the U.K. now, he is from Australia and knows the territory geographically and technically. He says in an interview with one of his book reviewers that he has “an interest in trying to make the issues and themes of what is an esoteric, and often inaccessible subject matter, more accessible through putting it into a more generally acceptable form, namely the political thriller novel genre.”

Indeed, it is a challenge explaining carbon trading, why there might be organizations like the GCMO regulating it, why activists like the character Dominik are dubious about it, why anarchists might riot over it, how banks and investors – both honest and corrupt – will try to cash in on it, and then turn it into a book that you want to spend a Saturday afternoon reading.

Raymond Chandler and Elmore Leonard don’t have to worry about their place in the pantheon. But they weren’t trying to write a story about something as tedious as carbon trading. Milling succeeds in making it interesting and even exciting; after all it’s not exactly, as Dashiell Hammett wrote of the Maltese Falcon, the stuff that dreams are made of.

The post Book review: Carbon Black appeared first on Corporate Knights.

Law of the Jungle is Paul Barrett’s telling tale of young lawyer Steven Donziger and his “obsessive crusade – waged at any cost” to bring an oil giant to justice for environ­mental crimes that go back decades. The giant in focus is Texaco (now part of Chev­ron), which drilled the rainforest and left 400,000 barrels of oil in toxic ponds, poi­soning rivers and the people who lived on them. (Chevron maintains it met all clean­up obligations and that Ecuador released it of liability in 1998).

It’s even more exciting when you’ve been to the scene of the crime. I visited Amazonian Ecuador in 2009 as a guest of the Rainforest Alliance. While there, I saw these toxic ponds and met the people af­fected by them. I also learned how these people were trying to maintain a life on the rivers and in the forest that didn’t involve working for the oil company. The damage is real and continues to this day as oil com­panies drive deeper into the national parks and lands of the Yasuni people.

Steven Donziger was a single man who was up against one of the world’s biggest corporations. The most surprising thing is that he wasn’t squished like a bug years ago. This was a corporation that could have properly treated the waste it created for a couple of million dollars in 1980. In doing so, it could have avoided spending many times that amount on lawyers and investi­gators over the past 20 years as it attempted to shut Donziger down.

Instead, Donziger went from success to astonishing success, winning a $9.5-billion (U.S.) judgement in Ecuador and cutting a swathe across the world as he tried to tie up Chevron assets from Argentina to Ontario. He turned Ecuador into the centre of the environmental universe, with Bianca Jagger, Daryl Hannah and Al Gore as bit players in the drama. Donziger knew how to play the media, the Ecuadorian courts, and public opinion; he was on a roll.

That is, until it all fell apart last March in New York, where U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan called the Ecuador judg­ment the product of “egregious fraud” and imposed an injunction that bars Donziger from keeping any money resulting from the foreign ruling. Donziger has since appealed the ruling.

Barrett, it should be noted, is a writer and editor at Bloomberg Businessweek and is no environmentalist. It’s clear he is less interested in the sins of Chevron than the sins of Donziger, who in September filed a “notice of defamation” against Barrett and book publisher Random House.

Donziger did appear to overplay his hand and overstep the lines. He is now ac­cused of writing the Ecuadorian judge’s decision himself, fabricating evidence and promising bribes. I could fill out this entire review with all of the exciting legal chica­nery that has been alleged, but that would ruin the fun.

Sadly, this book is being interpreted by many in the business press as evidence that the law should be changed to prohibit these kinds of suits; that corporations are being abused. Forbes magazine, for exam­ple, picked up on Barrett’s statement in his conclusion that “nothing has done more to weaken the reputation of the class action as a legal tool than the tendency of celebrated plaintiffs’ lawyers to overstep ethical lines.”

But this misses the point. Peter Maass, author of Crude World, a book about the oil business that includes a chapter about Ec­uador, notes that “the worst culprit in this case isn’t a quixotic lawyer who misplayed the bad hand dealt to him but the company that almost everyone agrees acted in a rep­rehensible way for decades.”

Law of the Jungle is a wonderful legal thriller and an easy and entertaining read, but it seems to me that the author can’t see the rainforest for the trees. Texaco and Chevron are long gone, replaced by the gov­ernment oil company Petroecuador.

President Rafael Correa, hugely popular among the poor, essentially put a gun to the head of the Yasuni, demanding that the rest of the world put up money to stop oil ex­ploration or the rainforest gets it. The rest of the world said no and the rainforest con­tinues to get hacked away, the rivers con­tinue being polluted and poisoned, and the astonishing disparity between the wealthy and the poor continues to widen.

This is a book about a lawyer fighting a big company. The big company is winning, and Donziger has proved to be no Erin Brockov­ich. But there is an important book still to be written about what really happened in Ec­uador, and what continues to happen to the rainforest and the people there.

The post It’s a jungle out there appeared first on Corporate Knights.

As for the title, Winston explains it this way: “If you believe that these pressures are real, then what has until now been called green business, or sustainability, cannot be a side department or a niche conversation in commerce.” Indeed, he continues, “we must pivot – sometimes painfully, always purposefully, so that solving the world’s biggest challenges profitably becomes the core pursuit of business.”

But first, Winston has to convince us about the seriousness of the challenges we face, and it’s a tough sell. He presents the hard data on climate change, but admits that it is easy for some to write off because the warming numbers don’t sound particularly scary; having shivered through this Canadian summer, they sound actually quite pleasant. He quotes one scientist: “You almost couldn’t design a problem that is a worse fit with our underlying psychology.” It’s so true. Unfortunately, for a short book a lot of space is given to a subject that most readers already know, yet it is not likely to change the minds of skeptics.

The mega-challenge of resource scarcity, however, is more immediate and obviously a business problem as commodity prices go through the roof and water becomes scarce. Food prices also increase as corn, soy and palm oil are diverted to biofuels; water supplies are challenged as they’re diverted to lawns and fracking. The business case for a big pivot here is more compelling.

The final mega-challenge is the challenge of transparency. Winston claims that every company that wants to remain competitive needs to answer tough questions about its supply chain and its environmental and social performance, “especially the ones coming from business customers.” Everybody is watching and there is nowhere to hide, so companies have to clean up their act. Or, as author and new-economy thinker Don Tapscott puts it, “If we’re all going to get naked, we better get buff.”

Winston is least convincing here. Transparency is a challenge, yes, but doesn’t seem to have a “mega” quality. There doesn’t appear to be a whole lot of buffing up of corporate bodies going on – at least not across the board. Lobbying still continues by some industries, such as “Big Ag” and the chemical industry, to block laws aimed at increasing transparency. In Germany, some politicians are even considering switching from computers to typewriters to stop prying eyes.

Most of Winston’s 10 “radically practical strategies” will be familiar to regular readers of Corporate Knights as part of the ideal of Clean Capitalism; titles like “Fight short-termism” and “Set big science-based goals” will ring a bell. However, the final strategy is more than a big pivot, it’s a whole new spin: “Build a resilient, anti-fragile company.”

Diversity makes organizations stronger. Variety makes crops more pest- and weather-resistant. A company, Winston writes, “with just one product line, technology or service that brings in the vast majority of its profits is at great risk.” He describes how a flood in Thailand nearly closed Honda when the only factories producing a few critical parts lost production. “A bit of redundancy in the system might be worth the expense if it avoids serious and expensive disruptions.” Indeed, resilient companies mimic nature, which gives us backup kidneys and eyeballs. Nature doesn’t put all its eggs in one fragile basket.

Winston is a techno-optimist who believes that if these strategies are followed we can build a resilient, green and profitable world. He thinks that the coal industry will be gone and that fossil fuel companies will either get into renewables or become much smaller organizations. It’s a stretch when Canada is building pipelines and the U.S. is shipping coal to China that’s too dirty to be used in America; where Scotland is basing independence on new North Sea oil finds. But perhaps that’s just my short-termist thinking.

The post A pivotal moment for business appeared first on Corporate Knights.

Rand makes clear he doesn’t think we have to boil to death. “The good news is that we can solve the climate problem,” he writes. “The capital we need sits in our pension funds and money markets, the policy tools to unlock it are well understood and emerging innovations are fully capable of powering our civilization.”

Yet the fossil fuel party keeps rockin’ in the face of the risks, challenges and opportunities. The vested interests, the captains of industry, the politicians are all “paid very well to continue doing what they do.” They hire pseudo-experts to confuse and deny. They claim change is natural and we have nothing to do with it. They claim that it is simple fraud. They claim that other issues should have priority.

Rand explains why people so easily “rest blissfully in denial.” He distinguishes between “active” and “passive” deniers. Active deniers, he explains, are those who don’t actually believe what they are saying when they go on about it all being a left-wing plot to create a new world government. Passive deniers are similar to those who lived through the cold war years – they suffer from the “psychic numbing” of living under the constant threat of nuclear destruction, so they simply put the issue out of their minds.

“There are lots of reasons for passive denial,” he writes. “It’s not unreasonable. We may feel powerless or overwhelmed. We might want to avoid feelings of guilt. We are afraid of what it means for our children.”

Rand proposes a way to change the conversation and suggests that we take advantage of our cognitive biases, put on a happy face, and promote “a brave new world of clean energy abundance and sustainable economic growth.” The trouble is, everyone kind of likes things the way they are, with their cars and their granite counters their plane flights. Party on. But as notes, “The best parties are often followed by the worst hangovers, and the fossil fuel party has been a great one.”

Indeed it has. Unfortunately, we keep doing everything we can to postpone that hangover, thanks to hair-of-the-dog innovations like fracking and arctic drilling aimed at squeezing those last bits of hydrocarbons out of rocks and seabeds. Yet Rand says we have to cut our carbon emissions by 80 per cent by 2030. “It’s a massive affair. Replacing it in a generation – which we must do if we are to avoid catastrophic climate disruption – is daunting.” To do so, he proposes an energy moon shot – “a publicly directed new low-carbon energy mission that unlocks the engineering, industrial and financial might of the global market economy.”

It’s a huge job, writes Rand. Indeed, it’s much more ambitious in scope than the original moon shot. “The energy moon shot is a multi-stakeholder effort. Everyone rows in the same direction. Science sets the goal. Government provides the right policy support. Industry’s job is to get us there, not obfuscate the science or lobby against the policy. Industrialists, financiers, and captains of industry contribute to the debate and start by saying, ‘We get it, we’re on it.’”

This 21st century moon shot would include a serious carbon tax, next-generation nuclear (breeder reactors), carbon capture and enhanced geothermal systems that tap the heat of the earth 10 kilometres down. That’s big stuff requiring big engineering, reflecting Rand’s own bias as an optimistic engineer.

Then there is the low hanging fruit that you pick by fixing buildings. Rand did it himself with his own Planet Traveller hotel in Toronto, cutting its carbon footprint by three-quarters. The irony here is that having a planet of travellers comes with a much larger carbon footprint, and as Rand writes, “we’ll never go without long distance air travel… it’s part of the glue that makes us a global community.”

So we’re left with the belief that we can all live in a brave new world, all row in the same direction, and at the same time we can get captains of industry to say “we’re on it!” Rand is truly convinced we can avoid the hangover.

But the unanswered question remains: Will we?

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Reading Adam Minter’s book Junkyard Planet reminded me of the many stories I’ve heard about the business, about the menches and the schlemiels who were part of it. Minter, who is Shanghai columnist for Bloomberg World View, traces how what was a Jewish business has become a Chinese one, as China developed a voracious appetite for scrap that gets melted down and returned to us in the form of new products. As an author and a grandchild of the scrap business, Minter is in an extraordinary position. His knowledge and background gives him entrée into a very secretive world. He understands what he is looking at and as a skilled writer does a great job of sharing what he sees.

It’s a very big business. Minter writes “the global recycling industry turns over as much as $500 billion annually and employs more people than any other industry on the planet except agriculture.” He doesn’t greenwash the industry either:

“If your first priority is the environment, recycling is merely the third-best option in the well-known pyramid that every American schoolchild learns: reduce, reuse, recycle. Alas, most people have very little interest in reducing their consumption or reusing their goods. So recycling, all things considered, is the worst best solution.”

It used to be a terribly polluting industry; the way you would separate the metal in a car from everything else was to burn it out. In the 1960s it was estimated that 5 per cent of America’s pollution was caused by incinerating automobiles. Then they discovered shredding, magnetic separation, and containerization. Then China emerged on the scene. “It’s unbelievable to me,” Minter writes, “when I was a teenager we sometimes charged to take steel scrap, it was worth so little. That was before China, before Asia needed metal.”

Now we export the scrap and the associated pollution to the other side of the world where it is out of sight, but still a horror story. Minter describes a visit to Guiyu in China, where 81.8 per cent of the kids there under the age of six have lead poisoning and where the government has to truck in drinking water. But like much of China, “its culture is entrepreneurial; its customs agents are notoriously corrupt; and there were once lots of poor farmers looking for cash wages to improve their life.”

The last chapter addresses the real issues and problems with recycling and why it is by far the worst of the three Rs. He describes one recent study where participants were given a task that involved cutting up paper (ostensibly to test scissors). Those who had a recycling bin beside their desk used twice as much paper as those who just had a trash bin. In other words, the recycling option actually increased consumption. The study concluded: “We believe that the recycling option is more likely to function as a ‘get out of jail free’ card which may signal to consumers that it is acceptable to consume as long as they recycle the used product.”

Similarly, Minter comments: “I encourage people to think about what it means to recycle, and make smart choices as a consumer before you buy that thing you’ll eventually toss out. Recycling is a morally complicated act.”

Indeed it is. It is the worst of the three Rs, but at the same time it has given new lives to Chinese farmers; a hundred years ago it gave new lives to a generation of Jewish immigrants. They all took what nobody wanted and separated it into its valuable constituents and gave it another life. But the highest value stuff is that which can be reused – the computers that can be refurbished or taken apart, the beer bottles that can be refilled. We generate far too much of the low value stuff, the cardboard, the endless rolls of Christmas tree lights, the disposable cups and bags that go straight to landfill because they are just not worth recycling.

But as Minter says, the worst recycling is still better than the best mining. He makes this and other points clear in a book that is at once nostalgic, shocking, entertaining and informative, all without one bit of greenwash.

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“A Purpose Economy is based on empowering people to have rich and fulfilling careers by creating meaningful value for themselves and others; it creates purpose for its employees and customers – through serving those in need, enabling self-expression, and building community.”

This isn’t just the “doing well by doing good” hippieish philosophy that we saw in Ben & Jerry’s or The Body Shop, two examples Hurst mentions; technology changes everything. So where farmers’ markets and crafts fairs have been around forever, now there are Etsys for crafts and networks like Ontario’s Local Food Plus to bring creators and careful consumers together. Hurst’s own Taproot foundation brings people who need help together with experts offering pro bono services. Hurst writes:

“Humans are social animals, and while community itself may not generate purpose, it is an amplifier. It creates a context and the relationships that make purpose so much richer. Purpose is most powerful when it is shared. It is the ingredient that makes farmers’ markets and local economies so much more compelling. It is the power behind so much going on in social media – from Facebook to Pinterest.”

The Purpose Economy is particularly relevant to the millennial generation that will be living in it. Having been born into a world where most of their basic needs have been taken for granted, and watching their parents “working harder and harder, spending less quality time at home with the family, in order to afford a big house, three cars, and all the accoutrements of success,” and probably unable to ever expect to have the same themselves, they want something different. They are spending their money on experiences and technology, “particularly technology that creates social experiences. It’s about interaction instead of consumption.”

The new technology has created a whole new economy of sharing, everything from office space (co-working spaces like the Centre for Social Innovation in Toronto and New York) to fundraising (Kickstarter now contributes more funding for the arts than The National Endowment for the Arts) to home- and room-sharing groups (like Airbnb). Hurst says it’s not just about the money:

“The popularity of sharing is not only a matter of saving money; it also comes from the desire for community, bonding people through the trust and reciprocity that are at its core, and allowing people to express their repudiation of materialism and the culture of accumulation.”

Hurst also notes the growth of the B Corp – hybrid companies that combine profitmaking with a social mission. They have been called the “Rock stars of the new economy” and include Patagonia, Seventh Generation and your publisher, Corporate Knights. There are over 850 of them now around the world, and they are where the millennials want to work, he says. It’s where everybody would want to work.

And of course, there is the rise of Freelance Nation, the home of so many of us these days. Hurst suggests that “so many have chosen the freelance path because they are put off by the strictures of corporate life and they want to have the latitude to select their clients, which they tend to do very carefully because they want to work with people they like and feel in sync with.”

Or not. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. More people, it’s safe to argue, are working freelance because they need money and there aren’t any jobs. As the parent of two university-educated millennials who are pumping espresso and mongering cheese and living in crowded apartments, I don’t see a lot of signs of a “purpose economy” in their lives. One has to wonder if Hurst is not in a Park Slope bubble; there is a workplace revolution going on right now, and it is technology driven, but it is destroying jobs in traditional sectors more quickly than it is creating them in new ones.

The Purpose Economy is a wonderful, inspiring book, particularly if you are rich and have time to spare to help others or are young with The Bank of Mom behind you. For them, “purpose is the currency of the new economy.” All others pay cash.

Purpose is the bonus we’d all like to earn, and which, it goes without saying, we should all aim for. If technology helps us achieve that, then all the better.

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