With sustained winds of nearly 300 kilometres per hour, storm surges of four metres, and half a metre of rain, Hurricane Melissa flattened much of western Jamaica, doing somewhere between US$8 and $15 billion in damage. But even as roofs were still flying off churches and palms were bending like stalks of grass, Edmund Bartlett, Jamaica’s minister of tourism, was already giving interviews to international media, encouraging travellers to visit and to visit soon.

The almost manic push to have all the island’s hotels operational by mid-December, when the peak season begins, threw into sharp relief a contradiction that underlies the Caribbean as a whole: it depends on an industry that, in some respects, is also responsible for its undoing.

The Caribbean is the most tourism-dependent region in the world. It is also one of the most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. Warming oceans, rising sea levels and increasingly frequent extreme weather events represent existential threats to the region: not only to residents but also to the tourism industry on which they depend. Sustainability, in this context, is not a nice add-on, but a necessity. If tourism is to remain a mainstay of Caribbean economies, it has to be resilient to the impacts of climate change, protective of increasingly fragile ecosystems and beneficial to local economies as a whole.

It’s asking a lot of an industry that, as Antiguan author Jamaica Kincaid argued in her 1988 book A Small Place, exhibits a similarly extractive quality to the slave-based plantation economies of the 17th and 18th centuries. Kincaid draws a direct line from Caribbean sugar to sand: resources that have been exploited by foreign powers with little to no regard for the well-being of locals.

“Tourism is both a lifeline and a liability,” says Therez Walker, who grew up in Antigua and is now a lecturer on sustainable tourism at NHL Stenden University of Applied Sciences in the Netherlands. “It’s a very uncomfortable reality that a lot of people don’t want to face.”

Half a century ago, when the imperial powers that colonized the Caribbean dropped preferential trade arrangements for their agricultural exports – primarily bananas, sugar and rum – these tropical islands, with World Bank support, set their sights on the postwar middle class’s growing appetite for beach vacations. Tourism ministries were established and tax incentives were offered to foreign developers. In 1970, some four million international guests visited the Caribbean. Since then, the figure has increased almost 10-fold.

Tourism now accounts for an average of 11% of the gross domestic product of the 33 political entities – sovereign states, dependencies and overseas territories – that make up the Caribbean. But in some countries, the sector constitutes a virtual monoculture. In Antigua, for instance, tourism generates 88% of the country’s GDP and provides 91% of all jobs, according to the World Travel and Tourism Council.

Such dependency on a single industry creates vulnerability, particularly when only a fraction of its economic benefits flow back to the country. The vast majority of revenue generated by Caribbean tourism lands with the foreign operators who control it: airlines, cruise companies and hotel chains. The United Nations World Tourism Organization puts the level of economic “leakage” from Caribbean tourism at about 80%. At the same time, local governments have to contend with 100% of the waste that the industry generates.

Climate change is only amplifying this vulnerability. Over the last five decades, rising sea temperatures have cost the Caribbean almost half of its hard coral cover: a blow to the marine life that coral sustains as well as the huge revenues generated by snorkelling and diving. At current rates, sea level rise is expected to reduce the Caribbean’s sandy beaches by half and to force the closure of a third of existing hotels by the end of this century. Likewise, extreme heat and storm events like Hurricane Melissa are becoming more intense and frequent.

When Walker, who has been based in the Netherlands since 2022, returns home to Antigua, she feels both frustration and sadness. The beach she went to as a child is barely recognizable. The water is higher, the shore depleted. Gone are the mangrove swamps and the thriving fish populations they once hosted. In her community, water is in chronically short supply: many households have running water only twice a week. When she drives past water trucks parked outside the island’s all-inclusive resorts, she is resentful – not of the guests inside, but of decision-makers who have failed to protect domestic and environmental interests.

The needs of tourists and residents are often not aligned. Drought for locals translates into a sun-filled vacation for visitors. The mangroves that serve as natural barriers against erosion and storms are the enemy of the pristine sand beach. The protected coastline that hosts animal, plant and marine life is an obstacle to shoreline resorts.

“Our policymakers go to UN climate conventions and talk about our vulnerability,” Walker says. “And then they come home and approve another huge development on an ecologically sensitive coastline.”

According to Beienetch “Bennie” Watson, who teaches tourism policy and planning at the University of the West Indies in Mona, Jamaica, the problem with Caribbean tourism is its foundation in a “colonial logic” that is top-down and externally driven. “Those seated around the table haven’t reflected the voice of ‘the people,’” she says. “The people’s vision of tourism hasn’t been heard.”

But in recent years, Watson has seen a shift, prompted in part by the COVID-19 pandemic, when Caribbean hotels stood empty and tourism revenue dropped by half. Some islands took the opportunity to promote homestays and longer-term accommodation options. Others directed visitors to more tailored experiences in eco-, adventure, and rural tourism. Watson is encouraged by a younger generation of traveller that, often prompted by social media, wants to explore outside resort walls.

A 2025 World Bank report on the future of Caribbean tourism emphasized the importance of moving beyond “sea, sun and sand,” pointing out how the short-term economic benefits of volume tourism – all-inclusive resorts and cruise tourism – have overshadowed their high environmental, energy, water-consumption and emissions costs.

Three months after Melissa, Jamaican Tourism Minister Bartlett went on an international marketing blitz to boost investor and traveller confidence in his island. At a luncheon in New York City, he announced that 70% of Jamaica’s hotels were up and running: a remarkable accomplishment.

But Watson, who lives in Kingston, has witnessed recovery on another level. Members of her church go out every Thursday to help communities that are rebuilding. She says the hurricane has proven something important to Jamaicans: that the island is close-knit, solidarity is strong, and residents’ needs matter.

Therez Walker agrees that change has to come from below. “We need to demand more of tourism,” she says. “This is an ‘us’ problem.”

Naomi Buck is a Toronto-based writer.

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Amid the cow-shaped ice sculptures at the 20th annual Embryos on Snow event in Colorado, buyers in cowboy hats bid on the genetics shaping the future of the United States’ cattle industry, from frozen embryos to semen. Auctioneers tout breeding programs, semen-collection-company sponsors and even “pregnancies for you to purchase” from a steadily growing sector of the livestock industry: assisted reproductive technologies.

At the National Western Stock Show, this premier event sold cattle embryos for an average of US$2,760, up to $26,000, this year. Bull semen sold for an average of nearly $10,000 a unit, with the highest lot going for $200,000.

What happens at Embryos on Snow and other genetics sales is a stark contrast to how meat and dairy are marketed today. Portrayals of food and farming in the United States often emphasize the “naturalness” of meat and dairy, yet in reality, much of the industry is shaped by intensive confinement, genetic manipulation and assisted reproductive technologies.

Proponents say that assisted reproductive technologies in animal agriculture, including in vitro fertilization, artificial insemination and embryo transfer, can improve efficiency, increase sustainability, benefit animal welfare and boost the odds that high-value genetic traits are inherited, such as increased calf and milk production. However, some bioethicists and animal advocates worry that these benefits tell only part of the story.

“It is quite difficult to really distinguish between the nice words and the ideals and aspirations” of assisted reproductive technologies, Koen Kramer, bioethicist and assistant professor in animal ethics at Utrecht University, tells Sentient, “from what’s actually happening.”

The cattle reproductive tech market

Despite the familiar image of cows on grassy, open fields, living and perhaps breeding in natural ways, the reality is different. High-tech assisted reproductive technologies are a growing agricultural sector for farmers seeking higher milk production and more and higher-value offspring. These methods of selective breeding typically include in vitro fertilization, artificial insemination and embryo transfer. In vitro fertilization is when the embryos are developed outside of an egg “donor” cow’s body before inserting one or more of the embryos into a surrogate female’s uterus. Embryo transfer is performed when a “donor” cow’s embryos are fertilized by artificial insemination, flushed out of her, and then inserted into a surrogate cow to carry to term. This way, a high-value cow can produce more calves. Flushed embryos sold for as high as $50,000 at Embryos on Snow.

Global bovine genetics was a booming US$3.9 billion market in 2025 and is projected to reach $6.7 billion by 2033. North America held the largest share of the market in 2025 at about 40%, with the United States leading the region.

More than 60% of dairy cows in the United States in 2025 were bred using artificial insemination.

Proponents of these technologies say they help farmers rapidly multiply an animal’s best traits, producing more high-value offspring from top animals. “You can amplify those elite genetics,” Alison Van Eenennaam, animal biotechnology and genomics specialist at the University of California Davis, tells Sentient. “If you look at the improvement in genetics over time, that has these knock-on effects,” she adds, citing efficiency, or needing “less animals to produce the same amount of product.”

Research on California dairy farms does show that producing a glass of milk in 2014 results in about half the emissions that it did in 1964.

Andrew Hunt, founder of The Bullvine, highlights several advantages of cattle embryo transfer. These include improved breeding success under difficult conditions, such as heat, and giving producers global access to “top-notch genetics” without moving live animals or risking disease spread to another herd.

Peer-reviewed research has also shown that embryo transfer can improve pregnancy success rates in heat-stressed cattle. Whether or not embryo transfer gives cattle breeders “top-notch genetics,” however, is up for debate. A 2023 review in the journal Animal shares the successes of embryo transfer in improving genetics, but suggests that in vitro-produced embryo transfer technology has obstacles to address before it will be efficient enough to meet the needs of the industry.

What about animal welfare?

The livestock industry primarily promotes the production benefits of assisted reproductive technologies, but some critics are concerned about how they affect animal welfare, biologically and behaviourally.

Kramer and bioethicist F. L. B. Meijboom argue in their 2021 Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics research paper that these tools may enable more intensive production systems that “speed up selective breeding for economically viable traits that affect welfare negatively.”

There are also bioethical concerns about magnifying biological and genetic issues through assisted reproductive technologies, such as an increased risk of abnormal development of the fetus and difficult births. A 2023 literature review in Animal suggests that in vitro reproduction may be linked to large offspring syndrome, a condition involving abnormal overgrowth, organ enlargement, congenital defects, as well as increased risk of difficult birth and low survival.

Meijboom and Kramer suggest in their research paper that these technologies could potentially reduce suffering by breeding animals more resistant to disease and stress, and could conceivably eliminate the need for painful practices such as disbudding (burning off calves’ horn buds) or de-beaking (common in egg and poultry production) “by breeding hornless cows and chickens with blunt beaks.” In the Netherlands, for example, there is movement toward phasing out disbudding and dehorning as part of broader animal welfare reforms. A key ambition in this, Kramer, who is Netherlands-based, tells Sentient, is breeding cattle to be hornless or polled. The hornlessness trait is a target in some breeding programs using artificial insemination, and Van Eenennaam led a research collaboration with Tad Sonstegard, chief scientific officer at Acceligen, to develop hornless cattle via genome-editing technology.

But Meijboom and Kramer also raise ethical concerns about how assisted reproductive technologies – and animal breeding in general – affect animal welfare and innate behaviour. They argue that there is also a risk of undermining welfare by altering animals’ true nature. In other words, even if these technologies can reduce physical suffering, changing animals’ capacities and behaviours may compromise their ability to live natural – or, to be more precise, species-typical – lives. For example, though horns can hinder livestock production, particularly in intensive confinement systems, research shows that horns play a role in cow social behaviour. “Polled animals may have greater difficulties in establishing stable social dominance relationships and may engage in more physical agonistic interactions.”

“It is about productivity,” author and activist Carol J. Adams writes via email. “The hormonal manipulation of the cow is a necessity, so they get to fuck with her, with another bodily intrusion.” She adds that “the cow is not seen as having bodily integrity. That would require the farmers to stop and ask ‘What right do we have to be plunging our arms into her orifice? What right do we have to force any cow to become pregnant?’’’ Adams has long studied and written about the sexual politics of meat and dairy and argues that reproductive technologies used in these industries are “scientific manipulation of reproduction in the service of profit.”

Van Eenennaam sees it differently. Breeding animals in a way that makes them more profitable also lends itself to breeding animals who are healthier and live longer, she argues. For example, she points to the U.S. dairy industry’s “Net Merit” indices, which rank animals and their traits, such as milk production, fertility, udder composition and disease resistance, generating a dollar value based on the combination of traits. Though it is designed around economics, it also incorporates wellness traits linked to animal welfare, including mastitis resistance, calving ease and mobility.

This commodification of traits, though, can also be seen as objectifying and instrumentalizing animals, Kramer argues. As female animals in particular are used as tools in this way, he adds, they become even more vulnerable to abuse and exploitation. During the 2025 Embryos on Snow event, viewable on YouTube, embryos are promoted based on the parents, described by the auctioneers as “milestone producers,” “one of the hottest bulls” and “proven matings.” And when a female embryo is up for sale: “Come get her, boys,” the auctioneer shouts.

At another genetics sale in Oklahoma earlier this year, the auctioneer refers to a cow, stating, “Great udder quality. Proven factory.”

“What we’re talking about is using, more discretely, the very best animals to have more offspring, and not having the bad animals have any offspring,” Van Eenennaam argues. “You could say it’s eugenics, and I would argue, well, that’s kind of what animal breeding is.”

At the Oklahoma sale, the auctioneer tells attendees, “We’ve got a few live lots, a great set of eggs, and some semen as well.” First up, a red angus bull, whom the farmer “built” from the ground up. “He comes from an incredible cow family,” the auctioneer announces, describing the mother as an “excellent donor there in their program. Great udder; just a beautiful spine; got a lot of look; very maternal.” His name is Cosmic Cowboy. Then the bidding begins.

Jessica Scott-Reid is a freelance writer covering animal rights and welfare and plant-based food topics. She is also the culture and disinformation correspondent for Sentient. 

The post Inside the booming business of cattle embryos appeared first on Corporate Knights.

As CEO of the Climate Solutions Prize, I meet founders, researchers and entrepreneurs from across Canada who are forging technologies that are not only cleaner, but better: superior products, superior economics and superior ways of solving entrenched problems.

They are not waiting for permission. They are already building the solutions the world demands. The next era of climate action will not be led by slogans. It will be led by builders.

Canada needs more of them. But we also have more of them than most people realize, and too often we fail to help them get from breakthrough to scale.

Opalia in Montreal has developed a way to produce real milk from mammary cells, without the cow and without the methane. In Kingston, Ontario, RXN Hub is building Canada’s connective infrastructure for green chemistry commercialization, providing the modular lab space, piloting bays and technical validation that climate ventures need. Dispersa, based in Toronto, has created biodegradable chemicals derived from wood waste that replace petrochemicals in cleaning and industrial products, cutting both toxicity and carbon footprint.

These are not concepts in search of a market. They are proven technologies, validated by independent experts, tackling urgent challenges across food systems, oceans and the built environment.

The bottleneck lies in moving solutions from validation to deployment, at pace. The issue is not talent; it is risk aversion. Too many promising technologies stall between proof of concept and market because our funding ecosystem remains too rigid and too slow at the critical stages. We need agile mechanisms to de-risk innovation in the eyes of investors, customers and strategic partners.

De-risking the path from validation to scale

What does connective infrastructure look like in practice? It starts with rigorous, independent validation: technical due diligence, third-party testing and feasibility assessment that de-risks breakthrough innovation for investors, customers and strategic partners.

This requires structured pathways where capital, innovation and government converge, not once a year, but as a permanent operating rhythm within Canada’s climate ecosystem. Initiatives like the Climate Solutions Prize are bridging that gap across seven innovation tracks, from energy to water to agriculture to the built environment.

The countries that lead the next economy will be the ones that not only invent breakthrough technologies but also create the fastest path from invention to adoption.

– Galith Levy, CEO, Climate Solutions Prize

The evidence suggests that the model works. When catalytic capital meets validated innovation at the right inflection point, investment follows. More than $12 million in prize funding has helped unlock more than $111 million in subsequent capital. That ratio reveals something critical: for many climate ventures, the barrier is not the calibre of the technology. It is the confidence gap, the hesitation – among investors, customers and partners – to be first to deploy a validated technology at commercial scale. That is where most climate ventures lose momentum.

A pragmatic path forward

I often hear climate innovation framed as a trade-off: growth versus responsibility, economy versus environment. I see it differently. The most compelling solutions I encounter are not the ones that ask the market to make a sacrifice. They are the ones that win because they are simply better: cheaper, faster, cleaner, more resilient or more profitable.

The countries that lead the next economy will be the ones that not only invent breakthrough technologies but also create the fastest path from invention to adoption. Canada has more invention than we often recognize. Our weakness is what comes next. Too many promising technologies stall between proof and scale because they cannot secure a demonstration project or attract the catalytic capital needed to move from a promising idea to a real industry. The countries that win will be the ones that solve that challenge fastest and figure out what risks are worth taking. That is the real race now.

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What Canada lacks is not science, entrepreneurs or capital. It lacks a system built for speed.

The point is not innovation for its own sake. It is innovation that succeeds on its own economic merit and delivers measurable impact. What we need now is the willingness to move faster, take smarter risks and build the connective infrastructure that gets the right capital to the right technologies at the right moment.

This is not a uniquely Canadian challenge. But Canada has an opportunity few countries do: world-class research, extraordinary founders, and growing pools of capital looking for credible, high-impact opportunities.

The innovators are already here. The question is whether Canada will move fast enough to let them win.

Galith Levy is the CEO and co-founder of the Climate Solutions Prize. The 2026 Climate Solutions Prize Festival takes place June 8 and 9 in Montreal. For more information: climatesolutionsprize.com/2026festival.

The post Canada’s climate innovators need a faster path to market appeared first on Corporate Knights.

In early 2025, European lawmakers drastically minimized the scope and scale of corporate sustainability disclosure requirements – cutting by up to 90% the share of companies that are required to report. Then, in December, European Parliament members delayed a law that would help reduce deforestation and forest degradation around the world. That same month, another law that was set to ban production of new combustion-engine cars in Europe by 2035 was watered down. In every case, global competitiveness was among the main reasons cited for the scale-back. 

But oscillating between climate leadership and regulatory retreat could also mean that Europe loses its place as a climate pioneer and an industrial power. “If Europe continues with this deregulation drive,” says Andreas Rasche, a professor at Copenhagen Business School, “the climate rules for European businesses will be written elsewhere in the world.” 

Simplification vs. deregulation 

Opponents of the European Union’s ambitious policies say they have overly complicated reporting structures and impose too much bureaucratic red tape. 

Rasche says that, in theory, regulatory simplification is a good idea, but “the problem comes in where simplification itself is politicized and is turned into an unjustified deregulation.” 

Fewer reporting requirements tend to mean lower costs, but that doesn’t necessarily translate into competitiveness. “The logic is that you increase competitiveness [by] reducing costs with compliance,” explains Hanna Ahlström, senior adviser and sustainability business developer at Æra, a consultancy firm in Oslo. But even if costs are cut and a company’s profitability increases, it doesn’t necessarily make a company more competitive, Ahlström says. For that to be the case, “the money [saved] needs to be reinvested in ways that makes the company competitive, and not all firms will do this.” 

While investing in new technologies is something that can help make a business more competitive long-term, the EU’s policy inconsistencies have also made businesses more hesitant to act. 

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For instance, Yara International, a fertilizer company, said in January that if the EU suspends its carbon border adjustment mechanism (CBAM), which came into effect on January 1, they will have to rethink a major low-carbon ammonia project in the United States. CBAM, which has so far avoided suspension, taxes EU companies importing steel, cement, aluminum, fertilizers, hydrogen and electricity based on the origin of the import. Yara CEO Svein Tore Holsether told Reuters that CBAM helped improve the business case for low-carbon ammonia products, but that regulatory uncertainty makes it difficult to bank on more expensive low-carbon investments.   

Businesses that make the first moves tend to also reap economic benefits as trailblazers, says Marcin Menkes, an associate professor at the Warsaw School of Economics and Vrije Universiteit Brussel. But when geopolitical turbulence is met with inconsistent behaviour on the part of the EU, it stifles not only innovation but also competitiveness, he argues. In order to make investments, companies bet on new rules and regulations being implemented. Uncertainty might incentivize businesses to be cautious instead. 

Even if a new approach, product or technology has an environmental benefit, if the rules change the business will incur the costs of being a first mover. “We must protect those businesses that boldly try to experiment, to deploy new environmental technology, technology solutions, without surprising them with different . . . regulatory approaches,” Menkes says. 

Regulation can mean opportunity, too 

When EU regulations stay in place, like CBAM has so far, there are business opportunities for companies willing to invest in compliance to gain access to the EU’s single market of approximately 450 million people. 

Canada, which ranks fourth in aluminum and 16th in steel production, could seize the opportunity to become a bigger player in the European market. Canadian aluminum and steel are largely produced by hydroelectricity, giving Canada one of the lowest carbon footprints among the world’s major producers. “Given the dependency on U.S. markets and the tariffs in place,” says Michael Lenaghan, associate director at Anthesis, a U.K.-based consultancy firm, “CBAM couldn’t have come at a better time for Canada and for steel and aluminum.” 

With the Canadian government looking to diversify trade, there is now an opportunity to become a major player under the CBAM regime, Lenaghan says. Currently, the EU imports most of its steel and aluminum from China, India and Turkey, he says. When comparing the emissions values to Canadian production, it’s significant: Canadian emissions are “between 50% and 70% lower across these materials, and that translates into a significant cost savings for EU importers when they’re looking at where to buy.”  

Lenaghan says that he doesn’t think that Canadian producers are fully tuned into CBAM yet. But it’s not every day that your competitiveness over other exporters is altered so drastically. “That’s what CBAM is doing,” Lenaghan says. 

It’s also an illustration that ambitious EU climate policies can co-exist with profits and competitiveness in a global market. “For me,” Copenhagen Business School’s Rasche says, “ambitious climate policy and competitiveness is not a contradiction.” It depends on the time frame. If competitiveness is looked at in the short term, there will be cost savings. Rasche, however, believes that competitiveness should be seen as a long-term horizon: “For that, you need an ambitious climate policy, and you need to decarbonize.”  

Ashley Perl is a Canadian freelance journalist based in Stockholm.  

The post Europe’s green retreat risks damaging its own businesses appeared first on Corporate Knights.

Engineers promise more dams and more tunnels to bring water from the Amazon side of the Andes – but the accelerated melting of Peru’s tropical glaciers puts even those megaprojects into question. 

Where modern engineering fails, can traditional know-how succeed? The answer is “Si.” A Peruvian non-profit called Aquafondo is rallying high-Andean communities – where ancient knowledge is still preserved – to use nature-based tactics to “sow” new supplies of water. Local people are restoring thousand-year-old trenches high in the mountains to redirect water flow into ancient, stone-lined canals, revitalized wetlands and, eventually, the underground aquifers that supply Lima. They’re also restoring grasslands and forests that increase the mountains’ ability to absorb moisture, reducing runoff and increasing the water supplies available to local communities. 

How meaningful can old ditches be? Studies by The Nature Conservancy in one community, San Pedro de Casta, found that restoring 20 kilometres of pre-Incan canals (known as “amunas”) boosted dry-season river volumes by 50%. Another study found that the cost of “sowing” the aquifers was just a third the cost of saving an equivalent amount of water behind a modern dam. Aquafondo now estimates that its community-based approach is adding more than 13 million square metres of water a year to Lima’s river basin – all while reinforcing traditional knowledge and creating new jobs in remote communities.  

The COP30 climate conference in Brazil recognized this success in November, where Aquafondo won the global “Local Adaptation Champions” award for nature-based solutions. “We have strengthened our unity, our identity and our capacity to adapt without losing our roots,” Aquafondo executive director Mariella Sánchez said after winning the award. “This is not only a nature-based solution. It is a solution grounded in memory, dignity and the leadership of our communities.” 

Rick Spence is editor-at-large at Corporate Knights.

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A first-of-its-kind report looks at the 20 largest credit card issuers in the United States and evaluates whether they were in line with the International Energy Agency’s net-zero by 2050 pathway between 2021 and 2024. The report, titled Better Options: How Large Companies and Nonprofits Can Select Climate-Aligned Credit Card Partners, was produced by Stop the Money Pipeline, a coalition of environmental groups targeting banks and insurers, and released on February 18.

Of the 20 institutions examined, 12 finance the fossil fuel industry, including expansion projects. The report, which was developed in collaboration with groups like Rainforest Action Network, Reclaim Finance and Stand.earth, also outlined how six of these 12 institutions, such as Barclays, Capital One Financial and TD Bank, increased financing for the fossil fuel industry between 2021 and 2024. Seven of the 12 decreased financing for sustainable energy projects, such as UMB Group and Citibank. All 12 need to increase their spending on sustainable energy at least 13-fold compared to fossil fuel financing to align with net-zero by 2025 targets.

“We wanted to look at credit cards,” says Sarah Lasoff, lead author of the report and special projects manager at Stop the Money Pipeline, because there is a “viable and ambitiously climate-aligned action that companies can take.”

Changing banking institutions can be a huge undertaking for companies, non-profits or governments, Lasoff says. “Whereas a credit card partnership, you can just choose another one of these large credit card partners, because they can issue millions of credit cards, and they’re not funnelling billions into the fossil fuel industry.”

The remaining eight better-option institutions, such as American Express and Synchrony, did not finance the fossil fuel industry. Instead of commercial or investment banking, these institutions specialized in issuing credit cards, as credit unions or as smaller regional banks.

It’s really rare that we have an opportunity to potentially move so much money towards a financial institution that is doing the right thing and away from a financial institution that is doing the wrong thing.

– Sarah Lasoff, Stop the Money Pipeline

According to another report released last spring, The Carbon Bankroll 2.0 by Topo Finance, the financial institute that a company chooses to partner with may be their largest source of indirect emissions. However, tracking emissions from a company’s financial institution is not yet a standardized practice, Lasoff says. It also means that companies should look for financial institutions that align with their own sustainability goals. “If companies started choosing the better options, there would be a market incentive for financial institutions to move away from financing the fossil fuel industry,” Lasoff says. Companies that have net-zero 2050 targets might be unaware that their credit card partner is misaligned with their own corporate climate ambitions.

The Costco case

Costco, for example, is a company that Lasoff says has demonstrated that it cares about things like diversity and inclusion, its workers and the climate. But Costco’s credit card partnership with Citibank, the second-largest funder of the fossil fuel industry worldwide between 2021 and 2024, is misaligned with its climate ambitions. And Costco’s partnership is significant for Citibank: it makes up 15.8% of all its credit cards issued.

Lasoff says that this is an opportunity for Costco to do what it already does but better, and to maximize its positive climate impact. “We don’t believe that Costco wants to contribute to the pollution of communities in the Gulf South and contribute to global warming, which is creating . . . more dangerous climate disasters.”

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Costco’s co-branded credit card partnership with Citibank is set to expire in 2029, and procurement of a new partnership could start as early as 2027. Lasoff says that previously Costco had a partnership with one of the better options, American Express, and she hopes that by sharing the report with Costco, it can make choices aligned with its climate goals. Lasoff says that Costco has received a copy of the report but has not yet responded. Costco also did not immediately respond to a request for a comment.

In addition to Costco, Citigroup has credit card partnerships with Best Buy, ExxonMobil, Home Depot and others. The report also mentions other partnerships with the worse fossil-fuel-funding financial institutions. For instance, JPMorgan Chase has credit cards with Air Canada, British Airways, United Airways, Hyatt Hotels, Marriott Hotels, Amazon and others.

Equipped with information about which financial institutions are the better options, companies can now decide to partner with financial institutions that are not financing climate change.
“It’s really rare that we have an opportunity to potentially move so much money towards a financial institution that is doing the right thing and away from a financial institution that is doing the wrong thing,” Lasoff says.

Ashley Perl is a Canadian freelance journalist based in Stockholm. 

The post New climate-finance campaign targets Costco’s partnership with Citibank appeared first on Corporate Knights.

EWF alleged that Tyson’s promise to reach “net-zero” greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, and its sale of “climate-smart” beef, could not be credibly substantiated. Before pulling its Brazen Beef line in 2024, Tyson had marketed the product as “the first climate friendly beef with 10% greenhouse gas reduction,” a claim that Matthew Hayek, an environmental scientist at New York University, says he never believed. Echoing what he told Corporate Knights in 2024, Hayek reiterates that “10% just seemed like such a fine-grained amount of emissions reduction that was well within the margin of error.” He is “skeptical that anyone had the information that could ‘prove’ that when that consumer went to the grocery store, they were actually getting 10% fewer emissions than the steak right next to it.”

“The decision to settle was made solely to avoid the expense and distraction of ongoing litigation and does not represent any admission of wrongdoing by Tyson Foods,” a company spokesperson told Reuters.

EWG claims that Tyson spent less than 0.1% of annual revenue on actual emission-reduction efforts, and that was “mostly on research – $50 million out of a total annual revenue of roughly $53 billion.” It adds that Tyson spends about “three times as much on advertising as it does on research.”

All the while, according to EWG, Tyson is producing greenhouse gas emissions that “exceed those of Austria or Greece,” with its beef production responsible for 85% of those emissions.

A particularly polluting food

One third of global greenhouse gases are linked to agriculture, with beef remaining disproportionately responsible. According to the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, “the global livestock sector is estimated to be responsible for between 12% and 19% of total human-caused greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, making it one of the world’s highest emitting sectors.” This has led some major meat-industry players to invest heavily in climate-friendly marketing campaigns and carbon offsets – not in reducing production.

For example, Canada’s Maple Leaf Foods, which produces pork and poultry, has claimed since 2019 to be “the world’s first carbon neutral food company.” It relies in part on offsets, according to its website, “that help us neutralize our remaining, unavoidable emissions.” The company has also pledged to reduce its Scope 1 and 2 emissions “by 30% by 2030 against a 2018 base year” and the “intensity [per tonne of product produced] of our Scope 3 GHG emissions by 30% by 2030 against a 2018 base year.” Scope 3 emissions account for roughly 90% of Maple Leaf’s total reported footprint, with third-party pork and poultry suppliers responsible for the majority, more than 30%, of those emissions.

Fellow meat giant JBS USA had also made similar promises, to “reach net zero by 2040.” But in early November, New York State’s attorney general found the company lacked any credible plan to meet that promise. As a result, JBS agreed to remove or revise its “Net Zero by 2040” statements on U.S. consumer-facing websites so that the target is presented as a “goal,” not a firm pledge or commitment. The company’s website now describes it as an “ambition.” It will also pay US$1.1 million to support climate-smart agriculture programs.

Hayek, who has long been vocal about so-called climate-friendly meat claims, says that while “greenwashing is not going away anytime soon,” he hopes these cases “bring a little bit more attention to the fact that meat is a particularly polluting food.” Hopefully, he adds, this “discourages unfounded climate marketing, and not the important work of climate-target setting and value-chain decarbonization.” What is ultimately required, he says, is to “make animal production less polluting and to shift away from animal production.”

Jessica Scott-Reid is a freelance writer covering animal rights and welfare and plant-based food topics. She is also the culture and disinformation correspondent for Sentient. 

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U.S. climate researcher Victoria Herrmann has a doctorate in geography and a specialization in polar studies, and she’s an official National Geographic “Explorer.” But when she worked on “America’s Eroding Edges,” a 2017 study of shoreline communities facing rising sea levels, she learned to shut up and just listen. Herrmann was the so-called expert on climate change, but the 350 community leaders interviewed for her study knew their communities best – and they pointed her toward local threats and crises she’d never studied in school.

The story Herrmann most likes to tell is of an activist in the U.S. territory of American Samoa, who showed her how climate change and culture are indelibly linked. He described how high seas, stronger winds and hotter temperatures were pushing more salt water onto agricultural land, reducing taro production. The starchy root vegetable is more than a staple food in Polynesia – it’s a cultural icon, a connection to the spirit, and a symbol of prosperity. To farmers in American Samoa, rising tides threaten not just their land and livelihood, but the meaning of their lives.

“Climate change, at its core, is a story about losing the things that make us who we are,” Herrmann told National Geographic, which helped fund the project. “The way we tell this story and find climate change solutions has to include our history and our culture and these intimate parts of us.”

The realization that the climate crisis is both a global phenomenon and a million different local disasters spurred Herrmann and National Geographic to form a new climate-adaptation initiative called Preserving Legacies: A Future for Our Past. Founded in 2022 in Washington, D.C., the project aims to help cultural heritage sites around the world – from the ninth-century Angkor temples of Cambodia to the 17th-century Spanish fortress of Cartagena, Colombia, and the wine cellars of France’s Champagne region – counter the destructive threats of climate change by devising their own place-based mitigation plans. (According to UNESCO, one in six cultural heritage sites is at risk of climate-related destruction.)

Preserving Legacies, which is sponsored by Canadian financial giant Manulife, isn’t in the business of telling its clients what to do. Taking a “train the trainers” approach, the initiative uses global climate models to create personalized threat analyses for each site to identify their likeliest risks from climate change, from flooding to crop failures to wildfires. It then offers these local “heritage custodians” a proven format for engaging local stakeholders – including Indigenous people, elders, artists, women and youth – in carefully assessing the risks and most optimal outcomes. In the end, each group prepares its own customized adaptation plan, building community and resilience throughout the process.

With Preserving Legacies active now in 35 countries, Herrmann hopes to extend the program to hundreds of cultural sites on every continent: “That is my big goal – that it reaches everyone.”

Rick Spence is the editor-at-large at Corporate Knights. He is based in Toronto.

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For environmentalists, it means acknowledging that end-of-pipe solutions like carbon dioxide capture and storage (CCS) do have a role after all. And for the fossil fuel industry, it means accepting that they need to decarbonize not just their own processes, but also the products they sell – and without expecting the Canadian taxpayer to foot the bill. In the short term, this might make those products less profitable – although it might also give them a more secure, if less exciting, long-term future.

Dismissing the notion of “decarbonized oil” as a myth is equivalent to saying that stopping climate change is a myth: but it has to mean genuinely decarbonized oil. Safe and permanent disposal of all – yes, all – the carbon dioxide they generate is the only way to stop fossil fuels from causing further global warming before the world stops using fossil fuels. And if anyone believes the world will stop using fossil fuels altogether in time to prevent dangerous climate change, we suggest that they look at recent events in Venezuela and think again.

A matter of timing

Make no mistake, we need to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels as far and as fast as possible. But every year that goes by makes it clearer that won’t be far or fast enough. Carbon dioxide accumulates in the climate system like lead in the bloodstream. We can slow warming by emitting less, but it won’t stop until we stop emissions entirely, or balance any residual emissions with active carbon dioxide removal.

It’s conceivable, albeit unlikely, that renewable or nuclear energy are about to become so cheap that everyone, everywhere, will lose all interest in using fossil fuels, even in “hard to abate” sectors like aviation, within the next few decades. It is also conceivable, albeit even more unlikely, that everyone, everywhere, will agree on carbon prices so high that they amount to a de facto worldwide ban on continued fossil fuel extraction and use. But it would be folly to bet the future on either of these things happening.

Everyone talking about “decarbonized oil” needs to level with Canadians about what it means. Capturing the carbon dioxide generated in the production and refining of fossil fuels is the obvious place to start – but it is only a start.

In the absence of that worldwide ban, or fossil-free energy that is cheaper than natural gas in Qatar, the only other way to stop fossil fuels from causing further global warming is to capture every tonne of carbon dioxide they generate and pump it back underground. This means capturing as much as possible at source, with CCS, and taking the rest back out of the atmosphere, through active carbon dioxide removal (CDR). The industry is already doing both: the challenges are not technical, but economic. CDR is still very expensive, and lots of CCS projects run over budget – often because operators have no incentive to control costs as someone else is footing the bill.

There are other, potentially equally permanent, disposal options, like reacting carbon dioxide with rocks or storing it in the oceans, but geological disposal is the only one proven on a multi-million-tonnes-per-year scale. And even that needs scaling up by at least a factor of 100 to have any hope of balancing all remaining fossil fuel use even in the most optimistic scenarios for renewable-energy deployment.

A pragmatic solution

Environmentalists should be actively promoting CCS, not trying to block it.

This balance, between ongoing production of carbon dioxide from geological sources with disposal of carbon dioxide into geological sinks, is what we called “geological net-zero” in a paper published last year involving all the authors of the six papers that established, back in 2009, what it would take to stop carbon dioxide from causing global warming.

Mark Carney trades climate allies for controversial oil-patch solutions

The carbon dioxide we are emitting today was locked away in fossil fuel reserves formed from ancient forests, marine organisms and plant material that accumulated over tens to hundreds of millions of years. In just a few decades, we are reversing that geological process, returning carbon to the atmosphere at a pace without precedent in the recent history of the Earth system. Atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations are heading toward levels last seen in the Jurassic period. And while it is sometimes said that “the dinosaurs lived with that much carbon dioxide,” it is worth remembering that they are no longer around.

The geological record reminds us that high-carbon worlds are not hypothetical, but neither are they environments in which human civilization has ever existed. The question is not whether the planet endures – it will – but whether the climatic conditions that allowed our societies, economies and food systems to develop can be maintained as we unleash, in decades, what nature took millions of years to put safely away.

Every hundred billion tonnes of carbon dioxide we release from the “geosphere,” or solid Earth, ratchets up global temperatures by one-twentieth of a degree – and we are currently releasing 400 billion tonnes per decade, so our carbon dioxide emissions alone are causing roughly a degree of warming every 50 years. That’s well-understood climate physics.

Can Mark Carney fight climate change while supporting oil and gas?

We can delay that warming for a decade or two by planting trees or cutting methane emissions, but once carbon is released from the geosphere, it’s out, propping up global temperatures until we, or our long-suffering descendants, can pump it back out of the atmosphere and into the geosphere again. And if there was a chance that we would stop using fossil fuels in time to meet our climate goals back in 2015, that chance is long gone. We are going to generate too much carbon dioxide, so we must work out how to get rid of it, permanently and at scale, through a combination of CCS and CDR. Anyone who still thinks otherwise is in a level of denial akin to those who dismiss global warming as a hoax.

Make polluters pay

All that said, everyone talking about “decarbonized oil” needs to level with Canadians about what it means. Capturing the carbon dioxide generated in the production and refining of fossil fuels is the obvious place to start – but it is only a start. We will also need to dispose of the carbon dioxide generated when fossil fuels are used. If that use is for road transport or aviation, that means recapturing it back out of the atmosphere. Technologies exist to do this, but they need to be scaled up.

Disposing of carbon dioxide responsibly is more expensive than just dumping it into the atmosphere: which is why the Pathways CCS project in Alberta is costing $16 billion dollars. But part of the reason CCS is so expensive is the way it is funded: through taxpayer subsidies. If the government asks an industry how much they need to get rid of carbon dioxide, what company would say they can do it cheaply?

There is another way of funding CCS, which is to package the cost of carbon dioxide disposal in with the cost of fossil fuels themselves. We don’t have to dispose of 100% of that carbon dioxide right away, but we must make a start: in our geological net-zero paper, we suggested 10% in the early 2030s, rising to 100% by or soon after mid-century. A mandate to capture and store 10% of the carbon dioxide generated by its production and use would add just a few dollars to the cost of producing a barrel of oil – less than typical taxes and royalties. If companies are mandated to capture and store carbon dioxide as a licensing condition for continuing to sell fossil fuels, they have much more incentive to do it cost-effectively than if they are simply subsidized to install CCS. And as CCS becomes more widely adopted, its price tag plummets.

The world needs fossil fuels that don’t cause global warming. So, whoever works out how to supply the cheapest and most reliable fossil fuels that don’t cause global warming is going to clean up, literally, on a planetary scale.

Canada’s risky gamble on carbon capture and storage

That supplier could be Canada, blessed with an almost unique combination of three vital ingredients: abundant fossil fuels, even more abundant capacity for geological carbon dioxide disposal, and, crucially, a world-beating reputation for climate and geological sciences and responsible resource governance.

The Canadian label

Mark Carney emphasizes that Canada’s oil should be “low risk, low cost and low carbon.” There will come a time when the only low-risk oil is not just low-carbon, but net-zero carbon. One day, no one will want to risk using fossil fuels at all unless either they or their fuel supplier has taken care of all the carbon dioxide those fuels generate, for fear of being held liable for the impact of dumping it into the atmosphere. We cannot predict when that time will come, but as climate impacts accumulate along with public outrage, it may come sooner than even we would have predicted 20 years ago.

If, in the second half of this century, Europe or China or an environmentally conscious U.S. airline wants to buy a barrel of fully decarbonized oil – that is, oil bundled with a commitment to take back and dispose of all the carbon dioxide generated by its production and use, either directly through a pipeline or back out of the atmosphere – who will they want to buy it from? Not from Russia, surely, absent some truly dramatic changes in Russia’s reputation for waste management. Probably not from Venezuela either. Possibly not even from Texas, if the U.S. administration continues to gut the Environmental Protection Agency’s capacity to monitor leaks from potential carbon dioxide storage sites.

They will want to buy it from a country with a proven track record, respect for property rights and the rule of law; a country that, back in the 2020s, made history by being the first to make geological carbon dioxide disposal a licensing condition of extracting fossil fuels and has been progressively scaling up her carbon dioxide disposal industry ever since; a country whose customers can be 100% confident that decarbonized oil really does what it says on the label. The Canadian label.

Myles R. Allen teaches at the University of Oxford in the Department of Physics. Andrew J. Weaver teaches at the University of Victoria in the School of Earth and Ocean Sciences.

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The EPA’s page explaining the causes of climate change now focuses on how “natural processes,” like variations in Earth’s orbit and in solar activity, influence the climate.

“Human causes are not even on the list, which is simply misinformation. It’s false,” says Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources. “And moreover, it’s clearly deliberate, because a week ago, that page correctly reflected the scientific understanding of climate change.”

At least 80 pages related to climate change vanished from the EPA’s site in early December. It’s one of the most far-reaching removals of climate change information from government websites since President Donald Trump took office in January. “Up till now, we really had not seen hardly any changes on EPA pages,” says Gretchen Gehrke, who monitors federal websites with the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative.

While important resources have already disappeared from other government sites – including the National Climate Assessments, a series of congressionally mandated climate reports translated for public consumption – many of the previous changes were language swaps, replacing “climate change” with more innocuous phrases like “future conditions” or “extreme weather.” The EPA’s most recent overhaul represents a more radical rejection of mainstream science.

“Yes, there’s been climate information coming down, but so far it hasn’t actually necessarily been the nuts-and-bolts climate science information,” Swain says. “This is pretty fundamental physical science.” The resources on the EPA’s site were used by teachers, businesses, and local and tribal governments, as well as the public, since they translated the jargon-filled language of scientific reports into something more useful and accessible.

For example, the agency deleted a resource explaining the signals of a warming world – everything from rising temperatures and melting ice sheets to the damage toll on wildlife and human health – with more than 100 charts and maps. Also gone is a website quantifying the physical and economic risks. The effect is to isolate climate change from the issues that affect people’s lives, Gehrke says: “It’s specifically targeting the information about why we should care.”

In response to questions about why the EPA’s climate change resources were removed, the agency said it was upholding “gold-standard science.”

“Unlike the previous administration, the Trump EPA is focused on protecting human health and the environment while Powering the Great American Comeback, not left-wing political agendas,” an EPA spokesperson said in a statement. “As such, this agency no longer takes marching orders from the climate cult.”

Swain says the changes could be a way for the EPA to bring its public-facing information in line with the proposal to reverse the agency’s own “endangerment finding,” the scientific basis that allows the EPA to regulate carbon emissions. The agency is expected to finalize the repeal soon, in what EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin has promised to be “the largest deregulatory action in the history of the United States.”

Mark Carney trades climate allies for controversial oil-patch solutions

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