Fall 2011 | Corporate Knights

Why bury the treasure?

Tyler Hamilton — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 21:27:51 +0000

Juergen Puetter could be labelled a shopaholic in renewable energy circles.

A few years ago, the president of Aeolis Wind Power began locking up land deals in British Columbia for wind power projects, only to realize he was spending considerable time and money on a resource the province didn’t need.

Sure, B.C. could use some of it. But Puetter overshot the mark, acquiring a relatively large pipeline of projects that had a limited market to sell into, either because of a lack of power demand or insufficient grid capacity.

Then one evening, while sharing a few glasses of wine with a friend on his sailboat, it struck him: Why sell into the grid? Why fixate on electricity as the end product?

The answer, in his mind, was to use that electricity to produce renewable fuel, tapping into a resource the province and its local natural-gas industry had no shortage of: carbon dioxide – the greenhouse gas most responsible for human-caused climate change.

Puetter saw the potential of using electricity from his wind turbines (or even buying low-carbon, off-peak electricity from the provincial grid) to power electrolysers that produce hydrogen from water. He would take that hydrogen and chemically combine it with CO2 to produce methanol, an easily transportable liquid fuel that is also a building block for a variety of petrochemicals.

In other words, Puetter saw tremendous opportunity in turning what has been traditionally viewed as carbon waste, to be buried out of sight, into what is increasingly seen as carbon treasure.

“There’s a near-infinite supply of CO2 that I can get for next to nothing, and I can use that greenhouse gas as fuel,” said Puetter, who created a company called Blue Fuel Energy to commercialize the approach.

He calls his fuel “liquid electricity” and, using a process that can be licensed from ExxonMobil, he’s also considering making a renewable form of gasoline from locally harnessed CO2.

The idea of recycling CO2 into something useful is beginning to catch on, with rising oil prices and ongoing concerns about climate change driving new innovations. Clean technology startups are seeing industrial CO2 as a key ingredient in a number of products, from methanol and formic acid to “green” cement and biofuels made from plants and algae.

Appearing to be losing momentum – if not favour – is the conventional approach that views CO2 as a pollutant that needs to be captured, compressed and pumped into deep storage underground.

So-called carbon capture and sequestration, or CCS, has for years been championed as a must-have approach to keeping climate change in check. Indeed, the International Energy Agency’s roadmap for keeping global temperatures from rising more than two degrees Celsius anticipates that one fifth of the world’s required emission reductions will come from CCS projects.

This is the fossil fuel industry’s preferred path. Critics, however, say it perpetuates the status quo of burning coal and natural gas for electricity, and it both protects and further entrenches a multitrillion-dollar global infrastructure built over several decades, as well as the carbon economy it supplies.

So far, however, talk of CCS has been largely that – talk. There are dozens of projects around the world in various stages of planning and development, but tough economic times and fading government support for climate action – expressed by the persistent lack of carbon pricing in most countries – has led many CCS projects to fall by the wayside.

Industry won’t cover the cost of these expensive projects alone, and debt-strapped governments are backing away for now. Not surprisingly, those CCS projects that are surviving are the ones that pump CO2 underground to recover more oil from aging wells.

“Every major CCS project in the world has been practically abandoned, and I’m not sure I’ll live long enough to see conventional CCS really take off in North America,” said Paul Woods, chief executive of Algenol Biofuels of Bonita Springs, Florida.

Woods is another entrepreneur who sees CO2 as a resource to be treasured, not buried. His company has genetically engineered a type of cyanobacteria, also known as blue- green algae, to gobble up vast amounts of industrial CO2 while basking under abundant and free Florida sunlight.

Through photosynthetic processes that have been turbo-boosted, the little green critters are expected to produce a constant stream of ethanol for as low as US85 cents a gallon. Algenol figures it can consume a ton of CO2 for every 125 gallons of ethanol it produces, and estimates its approach is vastly more economical than conventional CCS.

“No country can do CCS for under $100 a ton and so basically what you’re doing is taking $100 bills and shoving them in a hole in the ground,” said Woods. And that excludes the costs of ongoing monitoring and other potential liabilities that will lead to sky-high insurance premiums, he noted.

Why take on all that risk and uncertainty with conventional CCS?

“You give me $20 to $40 and I’ll give you a product in return,” Woods added.

Pond Biofuels of Toronto is taking a similar approach through a partnership with St. Mary’s Cement, a wholly owned subsidiary of Brazilian cement giant Votorantim Cimentos. As part of a demonstration project, stack emissions from St. Mary’s plant in Ontario are being piped directly to on-site bioreactors that have been optimized to grow a local strain of algae.

The algae can be harvested to produce high- value green chemicals or biofuels, which could be used on site by the company’s trucking fleet. The biomass that’s left over – about 75 per cent or so of the organism, once valuable oils are removed – can be dried using waste heat from the plant’s kilns and used to displace fossil fuels in the cement-making process. The next phase would be to deploy hundreds of bioreactors capable of consuming 30 per cent of the plant’s entire CO2 emission stream.

Steve Martin, co-founder and chief executive of Pond Biofuels, said there’s an appetite within industry for non-CCS solutions to their emissions problem. “They see this as an opportunity to differentiate their product,” he said, adding that a company that can market and sell greener steel or greener cement can gain a competitive edge. At the same time, they’ll be in a much better position to comply with future emission regulations or carbon-pricing schemes.

Different approaches are being tested across the continent. At Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico, researchers are using concentrated sunlight to bust up the chemical bonds in water and CO2 so their molecules can be reassembled into a synthetic gas and potentially refined into gasoline or jet fuel.

Similar research efforts are ongoing at the California Institute of Technology as part of a US$122 million “direct solar fuels” initiative funded by the U.S. Department of Energy.

In Texas, a company called Skyonic has fig- ured out how to capture CO2 from industrial plant emissions to produce bicarbonate, an ingredient in everything from baking soda to industrial detergents. Seattle-based Mantra Venture Group, meanwhile, has patented a process that uses CO2 to make formic acid, which among many applications can be used as a preservative and anti-bacterial agent for livestock feed.

And while companies such as Pond Biofuels are helping the cement industry reduce the carbon footprint of its operations, one Silicon Valley startup called Calera has figured out how to capture one ton of CO2 for every two tons of cement it makes.

“I don’t think there’s a single panacea. There’s no magic bullet you can point to that will fix all our problems,” said Martin, recognizing the massive global scale of the CO2 challenge.

“We have to look at a menu of solutions. It’s going to be an à la carte approach, and it has to make sense with where you are, and with different industries.”

Clearly, conventional CCS alone isn’t going to save us at the current rate of demonstration and deployment. According to the International Energy Agency, more than 1,800 large- scale CCS projects will be needed over the next 40 years to avoid dangerous climate change – at a cost of up to US$1 trillion.

If today’s dithering is any indication, the world will fall well short of that target.

Either way – to bury or to treasure – the clock is ticking.

The post Why bury the treasure? appeared first on Corporate Knights.

A new approach to cleantech

Mike Brown — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 21:13:08 +0000

I had a partner who once said to me when times were difficult: “Mike, we need to get ready to be lucky.” These days, it’s humanity that needs to get ready.

We are facing three major global problems concurrently. The most imminent problem is the debt crisis, especially as it affects sovereign nations’ default, the future of the euro, and the possibility of Europe and North America slipping into a lengthy recession.

Debt over the years has simply not been employed where it is pro- ductive. Productive borrowing acquires assets whose performance produces returns that have a margin of profit after the debt coverage. But governments have tended not to borrow this way, nor have con- sumers—hence, the situation we find ourselves in today.

The other two problems are “physical” in nature and are being expressed economically and socially. In the near term, we have “peak oil,” which is showing up as higher energy prices (recognizing that the recent fall in oil prices is due to reduced demand, not increased supply).

Over the past 100 years or so, the almost unbelievable improve- ment in standards of living has come about mainly because of very easy access to very cheap energy. Energy returned on energy invested (ERoEI) measures how much it costs to get access to energy.

This ratio, whose decline is the economic symptom of peak oil, is showing signs of severe negative changes to come, even within the next decade.

One of the reasons the world has prospered is that we never paid the true cost of this cheap energy. There is no carbon recycling fee— no tipping fee like there is at the local garbage dump. Unfortunately, there is a cost to filling our common atmosphere with carbon, and that is our third major problem: longer-term climate change, with its more gradual but no less important impacts.

All three of the problems I have just described are evidence of long-term, deep-seated issues that need to get resolved quite fast. Can we come to grips with any one of them? Or do we need to address them all at once? And is there any realistic pathway that involves the private sector?

Clearly, we need to act. It’s time to face up to the hollow truth: sustainability has to apply to financial stability, energy prices and climate change, all at the same time. Without more concrete underpinnings to get at a solution—and quickly—we will gradually slip into stressful instabilities, or “failed states.” These are those parts of the world where the patina of civilization is threatened by civil unrest, or constant political or military turmoil.

Needless to say, investors are facing very difficult decisions. Private investors, and especially those of us in the venture capital community, are challenged more than ever by having to look further ahead because of the time it takes our investments to mature.

Yet adversity, in my view, can create opportunity. The “triple threat” facing the world offers the chance for good fortune, and it is our brand of venture capital that should become especially valuable, as it can offer up one of the few possible answers: clean energy miracles.

And these miracles—call them inventions—had better be radical breakthroughs that can tackle our energy emergency. That’s because for the first time, instead of inventions and their propagation being nice-to-haves, civil survival desperately requires them.

Finding these clean energy miracles won’t be easy. The big clean technology winners will be technically intense and hardware-oriented.

They will need to replace coal-fired generating plants and change the way we move useful energy from one place to another. They will include new types of car engines and more efficient ways to use energy, such as LEDs. The great hardware breakthroughs are where the money will be made, not from a social networking site that encourages us to use energy more wisely.

But investing in hardware for the energy business is tremendously tricky. The breakthroughs almost never come from academia or even from within company labs. Instead, they come from the fertile minds of people who think differently than you and me. (If they came from ordinary people, they would have been invented already.) Yet when we combine the offbeat nature of a breakthrough invention and the offbeat personality of its inventor, the result is typically perceived as not credible. And, of all the marketplaces where the “not credible” could have a place, the energy business is most definitely not one of them.

Most energy businesses have been around for decades, and are set in their ways and averse to rapid change. And getting any new energy technology to a point where it’s generating meaningful revenues can be a lengthy process because of the need for multiple deployment cycles. If the typical venture capital fund has a 10-year life, then the average time for an investment from startup to a real liquidation event can’t be more than seven or eight years. This means that basing a liquidation value on revenues is simply too hard to predict. Cleantech entrepreneurs should understand that many private investors are leery of these clean energy hardware-type investments for precisely these reasons.

A different approach is needed, in my view—one that sees venture capital firms that are invested in clean-energy startups helping and encouraging strategic alliances with leading corporations. Ideally, these large corporate partners would also provide some capital in exchange for marketing or product rights through licensing or joint ventures.

Perhaps just being associated with large corporations would entitle a startup to a “credibility premium,” allowing for an initial public offering long before revenues are generated. Maybe the large corporate partner is the eventual buyer and maybe such strategic associations would help in persuading other sources of “non-diluting” capital (i.e., governments) to become involved.

Again, striking such partnerships with big corporations won’t be easy, and there will most certainly be a cultural gulch that needs crossing. People working for big companies generally don’t appreciate the motivations of people who work for startups, and vice versa. History tells us there are good reasons for that.

What’s certain, however, is that cleantech venture capitalists find themselves in a very unusual phase of investing. As always, investors must be dispassionate about social movements; they must watch, pay attention to the issues, and position themselves so that when answers are needed and become worth something, they have an inventory poised to rise in value.

Storing up that inventory—stacking our portfolios—is going to pay off hugely. But the payoff will be biggest if we all understand how to work with the big companies that have the wherewithal to bring energy miracles to market. This is a realistic pathway to solving the three major problems we face today.

It’s one way to get ready—and be lucky.

The post A new approach to cleantech appeared first on Corporate Knights.

It’s Bond, green bond

Sean Kidney — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 16:46:47 +0000

There’s a train leaving the station, one with a green paint job, and neither the United States nor Canada is on it. Not yet, anyway. China, meanwhile, is gunning for the conductor’s seat. Earlier this year, China released its latest Five-Year Plan. It made low-carbon industries a major focus, with a strategy that calls for seven industries—from electric cars to wind energy—to grow from 2 per cent of gross domestic product to 20 per cent by 2020. That’s a big call.

In many ways, China is an anomaly that is changing the rules of the game. It can call the fair and free trade shots in the World Trade Organization while domestically protecting its own nascent industries. It bankrolls cheap loans and subsidies, and grows national champions to compete on the international stage.

Even if the U.S. had the surpluses to replicate China’s strategy, its core values would inhibit it. This is simply not the American way. Yet the U.S., the driving force of the North American economy, still needs to be in the game.

What is the way forward? First, the U.S., along with Canada, has to break out of an old story: an oil- and coal-fuelled narrative that has denied real change. Within the pages of this story are the themes of high unemployment, house foreclosures, wages stuck at 1970s levels, environmental degradation and accelerated climate change.

Both countries, but particularly the U.S., need a new story of how they’re going to climb out of the doldrums, and do it in a way that minimizes the tax burden on citizens. It’s the same story being written by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development and others: economic revitalization driven by the vast investments needed to grow clean energy, boost energy efficiency, green our cities and build the industries that deliver all of the above.

The question is whether there’s a way to access the massive amounts of capital necessary to craft such a narrative.

Short answer: there is a way. The capital requirement to retrofit homes in the U.S. (selffinanced with energy savings!) is US$2 trillion. The capital needed to switch from dirty to clean energy over 20 years is in the order of $3 trillion.

Despite the market crash, the capital is there. The U.S. pension fund industry still manages $15 trillion and is always looking for investment safe havens. There are many ways to deliver those safe havens. Building solar plants in the desert that deliver a safe and secure return over 30 years is but one example.

Bonds, my area of work, can be useful tools for financing these kinds of initiatives. The U.S. bond market alone is worth $25 trillion. Compare that to total U.S. GDP of $15 trillion.

But the trick to tapping into this capital is to not assume bond buyers will wear risks; they need investment-grade deals. The good news is there are many ways that governments can help engineer investment-grade ratings; and when they do, the cash will flow, without the need to raise taxes.

In the area of energy efficiency, the U.S. has the beginnings of a model—the propertyassessed clean energy, or PACE, bond. Under this model, which still has some wrinkles to iron out, a loan to retrofit a house is collected back over time as a municipal charge, built into existing property taxes paid by the homeowner. There’s a low level of default, meaning bonds issued against a parcel of these loans are very safe.

Cities can also broker bulk deals with building companies to cut house-by-house energy use by up to 50 per cent. Home-owners in South Chicago, for example, can get a retrofit that reduces their power bill even after loan costs are included. Here, you have the genesis of a trillion-dollar energy efficiency bond market and some big wins in reducing emissions.

There’s a clue in that example: bonds are great to refinance projects once they’ve been set up and there are no longer development risks. A city might organize a $70-million energy efficiency lending fund (as Melbourne in Australia has recently done with some financiers). Every time the municipality depletes the fund it can borrow from pension funds against the security of those loans, using lowrisk bonds, and reinvest the $70 million in another round of buildings.

Renewable energy is starting to be financed this way as well. We just need to scale it up with government regulation to ensure the investments are safer than mortgage-backed bonds. This may require some guarantees that there won’t be any retroactive changes in policy (the investor’s nightmare).

Remember that this bond-backed green growth strategy is about building productive assets that have reliable revenue streams. It’s also about cutting energy bills and taking the savings to pay off a loan. The answers are there. We just have to work creatively to create the deals—fresh ways for investors, government and industry to work together.

These investments are long lasting, low in risk profile and highly secure; hence, they’re ideal holdings for pension funds. By providing a small slice of their capital through climate bonds, they could help create jobs at large scale, build a renewable energy export industry and finance a powerful tool against climate change.

So there’s still a chance to get on this train, if—and it’s a big “if”—we choose to write the story that way.

The post It’s Bond, green bond appeared first on Corporate Knights.

Still struggling

George Monbiot — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 16:30:42 +0000

Can you hear it? That screeching sound of environmentalists being torn apart? In my world, it’s ear-splitting. As green initiatives flounder, as concerns about climate change and the state of the planet slide down the list of public priorities, environmentalists are being blamed. Is this fair? Have we failed?

After the collapse of the climate talks in Copenhagen in 2009, governments began quietly to shuffle away from their green commitments. In Canada, you won’t have noticed much difference, as the Harper government was fiercely opposed to environmental restraints long before Copenhagen. The same can be said for the United States. But in the United Kingdom, the green consensus to which all the major parties have subscribed has started to fragment. Our government is now gutting the English town planning system, which is the envy of nations blighted by urban sprawl. Even as it starves essential services of money, it’s launching a new road-building program.

Senior ministers hint that they want to drop the U.K.’s carbon targets. They talk of using shale gas as a “bridge” to a low-carbon economy, which is like using chocolate fudge cake as a bridge to a low-calorie diet.

Is this because environmentalists have messed up? Have we alienated the public? Have we supported the wrong policies, promoted the wrong causes?

Plenty of people say so. One of our most prominent critics is the venture capitalist Vinod Khosla. In an interview with The Economist earlier this year, Khosla maintained that we “get in the way with silly stuff like asking people to walk more, drive less.… Environmentalists use artificial rates of return, buried assumptions and ‘what if’ assumptions about behaviour changes. It’s useless crap.” Instead, he suggests, only new, “black swan” technologies will deliver us from disaster.

There is truth in some of this. We have tended to overestimate both people’s willingness to change the way they live and the effectiveness of these changes when they do occur. We have been better at explaining what we don’t want than at explaining what we do want. We have engaged in magical thinking, particularly about energy technologies. We’ve supported useless projects we like the look of (solar power at high latitudes, for example), while rejecting useful sources (such as atomic energy) on unscientific grounds.

But in other respects it seems to me that we are being blamed for circumstances over which we have no control. One of them, of course, is the financial crisis, and the way in which it has blotted other issues out of public consciousness. Another is the power of the counter-movement. A paper published in the journal Environmental Politics in 2008 notes that “U.S. environmental organizations have continued to grow in both memberships and revenues.… Nonetheless, U.S. commitments to domestic and international environmental protection have declined.”

What has happened, it says, is that from the early 1990s, conservative movements directed their fire at environmentalism. Their backers, interests such as Exxon- Mobil and the Koch brothers, “launched a full-scale counter-movement in response to the perceived success of the environmental movement and its supporters.” This, the paper says, “has been central to the reversal of U.S. support for environmental protection, both domestically and internationally.”

Even in favourable political circumstances, many of the goals of environmentalism are inherently difficult to achieve. The truth few people wish to acknowledge is that environmental aims run counter to the primary goal of governments and business, which is to enhance economic growth. However many black swans take flight, more economic activity is likely to exert greater pressure on planetary systems. Yet achieving a steady-state economy of the kind proposed by the thinkers Herman Daly and Tim Jackson is a goal shared by no one outside the environmental movement, even though it could spare us from the catastrophic ebb and flow of the growth-based system.

Those who criticize us on the grounds of irrationality are just as prone to it themselves. For example, to use his blunt terms, there are plenty of buried assumptions and useless crap in Vinod Khosla’s prescriptions. Six of the projects Khosla Ventures is currently funding attempt to turn biological material into fuels and feedstocks of different kinds. But where will the materials come from? The world’s entire stock of biomass has now been pledged to half a dozen different suitors: it will, various enterprises promise, become the primary source of our heating fuel, electricity, road transport fuel, aviation fuel, chemical feedstock and biochar for soil fertility. The plantations required to meet a significant proportion of global demand in any one of these sectors would set up a disastrous conflict with both food security and the protection of ecosystems.

Both greens and venture capitalists need to recognize that miracle solutions to the environmental crisis are likely to be as disappointing as miracle cures, miracle crops and miracle financial instruments. The constraints imposed by the laws of economics, biology and thermodynamics mean that our choices are more limited than we often choose to believe. This is why, for example, we can no longer fudge the question of nuclear power. Abandoning it when we have no clear idea of what we will put in its place, and when lowcarbon sources of energy are scarce enough already, amounts to a guarantee that we will increase our use of fossil fuel, as Germany is now discovering.

The way the greens have explained the environmental crisis and the solutions they’ve favoured may be part of the problem, but it is a minor part. Compared to the people we confront—the fossil fuel and other primary industries, their lobby groups and counter-movements, a political class reliant on industrial funding, a business class just as prone to magical thinking as we are, a population which tends to put immediate self-interest above long-term concerns—we are a small force and a weak one.

We have a duty to base our campaigns on the best available information, and explain them to the public as clearly and persuasively as possible. But even if our analysis and prescriptions were flawless, we’d still be struggling.

The post Still struggling appeared first on Corporate Knights.

Heroes & zeros: vol. 1

Jeremy Runnalls — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 16:54:30 +0000

Hero: HSBC Canada

HSBC Canada revealed in October it has set up a $1-million scholarship fund at Toronto’s York University, which will be matched by the Ontario Trust for Student Support. In an initiative that Corporate Knights salutes, the fund will fully support 15 to 20 third- and fourth-year environmental studies students. The application process will be weighed heavily towards stduents with a passion for volunteer work, with the aim of freeing them up to pursue even more community service in their final years at university. HSBC decided to set up the fund at York because of the institution’s influential work on environmental thought and philosophy — it boasts the largest environmental studies faculty in North America. Corporate Knights is particularly interested in this scholarship fund as a long-running advocate for building sustainability into the academic curriculum, which is assessed annually through our Knight Schools ranking.

HSBC has been active in supporting other environmental initiatives in Canada, recently contributing to Evergreen Brick Works in Toronto and the Conservation Foundation of Greater Toronto, along with the North Saskatchewan River Clean Up in Edmonton. It supports environmental education for primary students through its Environmental Education Program, as well as the Clean Air Achievers initiative, which brings current and former Olympic and National Team athletes into classrooms to educate and motivate students. Despite its charitable donations and community engagement, the seventh-largest bank in Canada has been criticized as a significant financier of oil sands development. In continues to fund the Keystone XL pipeline, but by altering its energy-sector policy this year, it has joined a small group of other international banks that have sector-specific policies on the oil sands. Though it remains a fuzzy policy that will need strengthening, it is a sign that HSBC sees the oil sands as a long-term liability that it will move away from in the future.

Zero: Maxim Power

Maxim Power’s tactless attempt to rush through a coal-burning power plant before federal regulators kick in gives the company a well-deserved Zero in our books. The proposed plant, near Grande Cache, Alberta, would emit roughly three million tonnes of greenhouse gases a year–twice the carbon dioxide-equivalent of a natural gas-fired plant of similar output. The company fears having to comply with new federal emissions standards, stating that the prospect of compliance “magnifies the risk of irreparable harm to Maxim.” The Alberta Utilities Commission, with prompting from Maxim, fast tracked approval for the plant so it could avoid the July 2015 compliance date. An Alberta appeals court in October upheld the decision in the face of legal action by environmental organization Ecojustice.

The federal government’s support for the project remains unclear. Environment Minister Peter Kent told the Canadian Press in September that “it was never the intention to create a loophole for short-cutters.” But Maxim recently claimed that it had received private affirmation from the federal environment minister himself. The Harper government has the power to unilaterally move up the compliance date to stop Maxim’s actions, if it so chooses.

Approval of this plant is particularly surprising, as the two previous coal plants built in Alberta were only approved on the condition that they offset their emissions by half, down to the levels of a natural-gas-fired plant. This new plant does not have the same requirements and as a result will be releasing, according to the David Suzuki Foundation, the additional emissions equivalent of putting 300, 000 vehicles on the road over its 45-year lifespan. Alberta’s Environment Ministry has yet to approve the plant, but if federal provincial officials sign on, opponents have brought up the possibility of blocking the approval of transmission lines to the plant or engaging in a series of public protests to stop construction. Whatever the outcome, the brazen attempts to circumvent impending federal regulation have not done embattled Albertan utilities any favours in the public eye.

Click here to view our complete Heroes & Zeros series.

The post Heroes & zeros: vol. 1 appeared first on Corporate Knights.

Manfred Gingl

CK Staff — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 16:18:42 +0000

Manfred Gingl, a former president and chief executive officer of auto-parts giant Magna International, has shifted gears in recent years. A collector of cars, the Austrian-born executive and close confidant to Magna founder Frank Stronach also has a personal interest in and love for bicycles. In 2007 he decided to extend that interest to e-bikes and related electric propulsion technologies. He acquired what was considered the best e-propulsion system for bicycles in the world and this gave birth to Aurora, Ontario-based BionX International, which has become a market leader in just three years.

The BionX system – which can be purchased as a bicycle retrofit product or pre-installed on many of the top cycle brands – offers a seamless electric-assist riding experience and could very well get more North Americans peddling and exercising again. The electric propulsion system only kicks in when the rider requires it, such as when tackling steep hills or headwinds. The rider still peddles, and exercises, but the experience is more enjoyable – an attractive option for aging boomers previously turned off of cycling.

Last month, BionX launched its first marine product, an electric-assist pedal watercraft called the SeaScape. It is the company’s first move outside of the e-bike market, but Gingl promises it won’t be the last. Corporate Knights had a chance to sit down with Gingl for a chat about the future of e-bikes and electric mobility.

CK: Electric bicycles are a booming market in Europe and Asia. Why have they not taken off the same way in North America?

GINGL: I don’t see it as people being against it, it’s just that the infrastructure isn’t there for bicycling, period. Young kids are not growing up with a bicycle as much as they do in some other countries, and they don’t use it as a means to travel. A bicycle in Europe is a workhorse as much as a joy. People in Europe don’t want to use their car if it’s a nice day, and people use their bikes even when it rains. It’s part of their lifestyle. It keeps them going, gives them exercise. Go to Amsterdam. I haven’t seen so many bicycles in one spot. It’s unbelievable. So I think it’s about giving it exposure, about the marketing, about the government building up infrastructure and building proper bike paths.

CK: You’re a car guy. You love cars. You collect them. Now your attention is on electric-assist bicycles, paddle boats and more. Why the shift of focus to products that are part human, part electrically driven?

GINGL: By no means do I call myself a tree hugger, but for sure we have to be more sensitive and more caring toward our planet. Just as important, we have to look after ourselves. Three years ago I said to myself, I want to create a product portfolio that serves the human species and that gets us interactive with technology. The key is to get us mobilized again.

CK: E-bike technology would seem ideal for an older demographic less likely to cycle for fear of having to navigate hills or strong headwinds. Is this the market you’re after?

GINGL: That’s for sure the opportunity, absolutely. It’s growing. But when we analyze the last three years of sales, the age is coming down surprisingly. Thirty six years young – that’s the average age now of people buying this kind of product. When I got into this, no one would have thought of putting this technology on cross-country or hill-climbing bikes. Now KTM, the bicycle maker in Austria, is making almost 2,000 race bikes with the BionX system strictly for the woods and climbing hills.

CK: Frank Stronach is the controlling shareholder of BionX. He’s also heavily invested in Magna e-Car Systems, the electric-vehicle venture majority owned by Magna International. You and Stronach appear to be making big bets on electric mobility, yet there is still much skepticism in the market around electric cars and battery technology. What’s your take on this?

GINGL: The driving force of the skepticism is that the cost of the battery technology is still too high. But so it was when the cell phone came out. We carried a seven pound thing around our neck, which was ridiculous. Look where we are today. Similarly, battery technology is not standing still. There are mega players developing and improving on battery cells at record speed, making progress. So yes, it’s coming. But I think you will get market segmentation. You’ll have hybrids that drive in both energy modes and you will also have a segment called the city car, or commuter car. Sure, you’ll still have your larger (gas-powered) car for when you go to the cottage. But look, it’s coming. We can’t just keep doing what we’re doing right now. It’s not responsible.

CK: You seem quite positive about the future of BionX, and electric mobility in general.

GINGL: You know why I’m so positive about this? I still have a 14 year old. About three years ago when I got into this new business, he gave me crap because I bought another 12-cylinder car. He said “Dad, what are you doing?” He didn’t speak to me for three days. And the grandchildren, they learn about this early in school. They’re asking, “Opa, are you for real? Why don’t you buy a small car?” It’s where we’re heading.

The post Manfred Gingl appeared first on Corporate Knights.

Ex-pats in Silicon Valley

Tyler Hamilton — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 16:04:10 +0000

It’s a question the Cleantech Group, a research firm focused on cleantech innovation and investment, continually asks as part of its Top 100 global rankings.

According to this year’s rankings, 58 companies on the list call the United States home. Only three Canadian companies made the ranking, an indication that our highly skilled and innovative clean technology entrepreneurs need to do a better job of attracting attention beyond domestic borders.

A group of ex-pats working out of Silicon Valley are lending a helping hand. They call themselves the C100 CleanTech, and their members are representatives of top U.S. venture capital firms with a combined $7 billion under management.

Their plan is to seek out the best and brightest cleantech entrepreneurs in Canada and invite them down to Silicon Valley, where they will be mentored and introduced to a rich network of potential customers, investors and partners.

“Capital knows no borders and a good investment is a good investment,” said Jon Quick, a director at VantagePoint Capital Partners, a founding C100 CleanTech member.

VantagePoint is one of the top venture capital firms in California with investments in such companies as electric car pioneer Tesla Motors and solar-thermal power developer BrightSource Energy.

It has also invested in Vancouver-based Ostara Nutrient Recovery Technologies, which was recognized in Corporate Knights’ Cleantech Next 10 rankings in 2009.

Quick, who was born and raised in Toronto, says that not enough companies in Canada look at the big picture and think beyond their own backyard. “It’s something we’re emphasizing,” he said. “It’s all about partnering. It’s access to markets. It’s a long-term strategic vision of where you’re going and where that fits into the ecosystem.”

C100 CleanTech officially launched in November 2010, and has partnered up with Sustainable Development Technology Canada, the Business Development Bank of Canada, the Consulate General of Canada and MaRS Discovery District.

In December, the group will select eight to 10 Canadian companies totake part in a “48 hours in the Valley” program and have the “opportunity to spend time with some of the Valley’s most successful entrepreneurs, investors and executives in both formal and informal settings.”

Said program director Atlee Clark: “We just want to bring them down and help them take their business to the next level.

The post Ex-pats in Silicon Valley appeared first on Corporate Knights.

The wisdom of youth

Tara Perkins — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 20:38:18 +0000

Clinton is a doctoral student with a master’s degree from Oxford who has worked for a renowned consulting firm, as well as one of the world’s largest hedge funds. But IAC, a NASDAQ-listed firm that owns websites such as Ask.com and The Daily Beast, was forced to defend its decision. Had Clinton gained enough wisdom in her 31 years to make her a valuable director in her own right, or was she appointed because of who her parents are?

It’s an interesting discussion, one that begs the question: should there be a minimum age requirement to sit on a corporate board?

The answer, according to most governance experts, is no. Directors at Canadian firms are tasked with overseeing management, weighing in on strategy, and keeping tabs on the company’s finances. Increasingly, they are also recognizing the value of integrating social and environmental considerations into corporate strategy and risk management. And it seems plausible that younger directors would be more in tune with issues such as climate change or the concerns of the Occupy Wall Street protesters. “A lot of MBAs are now learning about sustainability, and so a board is likelier, in recruiting a younger person, to be recruiting somebody who through their education was exposed to sustainability trends and their impacts on the firm,” says Coro Strandberg, a consultant who teaches boards about sustainable leadership and economic innovation, and who herself was a director of Vancity Credit Union throughout her thirties.

The benefits of having a diverse board to discuss such matters have been increasingly recognized, but while much has been written about gender and other personal characteristics, age rarely comes up. That might be because the boardrooms of Canada’s blue chip companies continue to be heavily skewed towards those who were born when you could still buy a new house for $15 000.

Data compiled by Corporate Knights on directors at the companies that make up the S&P/TSX 60—large companies that represent more than two-thirds of Canada’s stock market value—found only four individuals under the age of 40. They include two offspring of the country’s corporate elite: Galen Weston Jr. at Loblaw Companies and Martha Loretta Rogers at Rogers Communications. The youngest director, at 35, is G. Mason Morfit at Valeant Pharmaceuticals International, who is a partner at one of its largest investors. The fourth thirty-something is Nathaniel P. Rothschild of the venerable Rothschild family, a financier based in Switzerland who sits on the board of Barrick Gold. Barrick also has two forty-something directors, Dambisa Moyo, 42, and the company’s CEO, Aaron Regent, who is 45.

Barrick’s founder and chairman, Peter Munk, says that young directors are an asset. “The benefits are enormous. You can’t have [only] a bunch of white old men at the table,” he says, recognizing that young directors ask more questions and are less prepared to accept the status quo. “Revolutions have not been started by people over 60. By definition young people are more questioning of why we do things the way we do,” says Munk. Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPPIB), which manages the future pensions of 17 million Canadians, has a formal protocol under which it teams up one of its younger self was named one of Canada’s Top 40 under 40 in 2006, says he is a believer in the benefits of younger directors for companies.

“I’d rather have somebody relatively less experienced who is going to be highly engaged than somebody who is highly experienced but checked out,” he says. “You’re just catching them earlier in their career. They’re just as smart, just as talented, and they’re probably more energetic.” Marc Tellier, who is the CEO and also a director at Yellow Media, became a director of National Bank of Canada, the country’s sixth largest bank, in 2005 when he was only 36. He believes that employee engagement is critical in today’s business climate where employee retention is often a strategic priority. “It was easier, arguably, to manage employee issues back in the late ’70s, when people would join organizations like IBM for life,” he observes.

Young directors can inspire young employees, who are increasingly seeking out employers that share their views on issues such as social and environmental sustainability, and that articulate a corporate vision they support. Having board members who reflect these values can help attract and seed an organization with top talent.

Tellier said that young people are also naturally more in tune with technology and its staggering impact on things like consumption patterns.

Technology is also making it easier for shareholders, consumers and special interest groups.

“Having said that, the nature of the business or organization could favour younger directors, say under 40,” he adds. “If the business is social media or say, skateboard or snowboard manufacturing and sales, the most experienced people in the room could well be the under-40 crowd. At the end of the day, we at the ICD believe that one size doesn’t fit all. We encourage boards to be open-minded about diverse candidates, not for diversity’s sake but because it can introduce an important perspective for better decision-making that will add value to the business or organization.”

The most important credential in choosing directors must be the individual’s match to that specific board’s needs. In the debate over Clinton, Eric Jackson, a founder of Ironfire Capital, wrote in a blog post on Forbes.com that he thinks Clinton was “a terrible choice—not because she’s not smart, not because she’s young, not because of possible favouritism or cronyism, but because she doesn’t have any industry experience or skin in the game.”

The post The wisdom of youth appeared first on Corporate Knights.

Renewable opportunity

CK Staff — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 15:00:11 +0000

North America’s electricity sector is in the throes of dramatic transformation, and this is creating a bounty of opportunity for Aboriginal communities across Canada looking to tap the country’s renewable energy potential.

Three mega-forces are driving the change. Antiquated power plants, many built in the 1970s or earlier, are past their prime and must be mothballed. The environmental impacts of coal-based generation have also prompted regulatory changes that place greater value on cleaner sources of energy. And finally, a rising proportion of power authorities—not to mention industrial, commercial and residential consumers—are prepared to pay a higher price for non-polluting power.

The result is that a new electricity playing field has emerged and new players are entering the game. Canada’s First Nations, Métis and Inuit communities are among them, and it’s a game they’re poised to play well—and potentially dominate.

They have one advantage others don’t have. A high percentage of potential green power development is located on Crown lands, owned by the federal, provincial or territorial governments. Much of it is land that has been used by Canada’s indigenous people for generations to support their traditional way of life.

Supreme Court rulings, government policy and public expectation have reinforced the principle that resource development on traditional territory requires a duty to consult with local stakeholders. First Nations, Métis and Inuit communities are understandably protecting their turf, making strong claims that the development of renewable energy on their territory can only be possible through Aboriginal participation and ownership.

This should not come as a surprise. Native peoples have historically embraced renewable energy business opportunities. The notion of using the gifts of Mother Earth as a source of power is deeply woven into the cultures of the First Peoples of Canada. Simply put, hydro, solar, biomass, earth or wind power are cultural “fits” with Aboriginal communities seeking to build a sustainable and prosperous future. Not to suggest they want to pursue this opportunity alone. There is a squad of strong businesses ready to team up, and already we’re seeing utilities such as Ontario Power Generation and power development firms such as Alterra Power Corp. becoming willing development and financial partners with First Nations and Métis communities.

The score is rising fast. At the beginning of 2010, some 20 Aboriginal communities across the country owned a portion of clean energy facilities. By the end of that year an additional 24 Aboriginal clean energy projects had been approved. These projects are located mostly in Ontario and British Columbia, but action is Canada-wide and the trend is gathering momentum.

The Dokis First Nation, for example, has developed the Okikendawt Hydroelectric Project on Ontario’s French River with partner Hydromega of Québec. The 10-megawatt small hydro facility is a smart sustainability venture using existing infrastructure, and it avoids the use of new dams. About to begin construction, the project has been widely praised for its inclusion of heritage factors, such as the re-building of the historical Chaudiere portage trail, and environmental species protection. Okikendawt Hydro is among over a hundred small- and medium-sized Aboriginal clean energy projects in the pipeline from coast to coast.

The real game changer, however, is the roughly 20 large-scale hydro and wind power projects on the play list. All of these projects are either slated for development by their respective provincial government or under active consideration. These are huge initiatives, requiring tens of billions of dollars of investment. All are on traditional Aboriginal territory and will require the agreement of First Nations, Métis and Inuit communities to proceed.

One of those communities is the James Smith First Nation in Saskatchewan. Working with partners Brookfield Renewable Power and Peter Kiewit Sons, it is seeking to develop the 200-megawatt Pehonan hydroelectric project on the Saskatchewan River, east of Prince Albert. The project requires provincial and federal approval, and Crown utility SaskPower plays a major decision-making role.

Wind projects on the docket include Henvey Inlet in Ontario and the NaiKun project in Haida Gwaii, B.C. Ideal sites for both wind and hydro development on a large scale dot the Canadian landscape. My firm Lumos Energy estimates that the total installed capacity from the top 20 large hydro and wind projects to be developed will amount to an additional 13,000 megawatts and require an investment of $50-$60 billion. That’s roughly equal to about a third of Ontario’s current peak electricity demand.

Will all these large hydro and wind projects be fully realized? It’s highly unlikely, though most of them are on track. They just need to overcome major hurdles, such as obtaining all necessary environmental permits and getting access to and building new high-voltage transmission corridors. Another major challenge will be to ensure deals are structured so that Aboriginal communities, as project partners, get fair and equitable terms.

The economic upside is huge when considering the required infrastructure investment, job creation potential and cost-competitive power this will bring over the long term. There are also the environmental benefits of adding more renewable power to the electricity system.

Of crucial importance to the Canadian economy is that a large proportion of power to be generated from these large hydro and wind projects is targeted for export to the United States. Indeed, provinces like Newfoundland and Labrador, New Brunswick, Québec, Manitoba and B.C. plan to build part of their future economic foundation on clean energy exports to New England and the West Coast States. Even Ontario envisions a more robust power-exporting future as larger projects come online.

It is power the U.S. will inevitably need. Power utilities and consumers there face stark choices. One; they can refurbish older coal plants with large capital investments, including expensive emissions control systems. Two; they can build new co-generation infrastructure which, while a viable option given the current low price and abundance of natural gas, is environmentally dodgy if it depends heavily on the development of shale-gas resources. Three; they can adopt a more diversified approach to meeting future electricity demand by blending capital investment in modern generating capacity with longterm contracts to import renewable electricity from Canada.

The third option may have the strongest appeal. It lessens capital investment demands and reduces risk exposure that comes with an overreliance on volatile fossil fuel prices. Moreover, large-scale renewable energy projects, especially major hydro sites, have proven to be an effective means of keeping electricity prices low over the long term. Provinces with the highest percentage of large hydro in their electricity mix, notably Québec, Manitoba and B.C., have the lowest retail electricity prices in North America. In addition, these imports will help states comply with increasingly strict airpollution regulations and future caps on carbon emissions. For this reason, power authorities across Canada are exploring ways to increase electricity exports to the U.S. based on large renewable energy projects developed in partnership with Aboriginal communities.

The role Aboriginal communities are poised to play in the future of clean energy development in Canada is undeniable, and it will become increasingly visible. For all involved, it represents a win-win-win proposition—for Canada’s First Peoples, for the economy and for the environment.

The post Renewable opportunity appeared first on Corporate Knights.

Conrad Black on the 99%

CK Staff — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 19:28:20 +0000

The Wall Street Occupiers have some legitimate grievances, but are effectively asking redress of the grievances by their authors. The complaints against the Wall Street bailouts, in which they echo the Tea Partiers they affect to despise, are not well-founded. The taxpayers will make money on the bailouts and great misery and confusion has been avoided by them, though Henry Paulson’s original Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP, of the government buying distressed assets directly was nonsense. There have been design errors in the bailouts, in that so much of the payoff in the automobile industry has been to the egregious, Luddite, avaricious United Auto Workers, which was the greatest single architect of the near-death and out-of-body experiences of the once invincible U.S. auto industry. This bailout complaint by the Occupiers is also inconsistent with the succeeding complaint that organized labour is under siege from the U.S. government, which is in fact grovelling to it, completely undeservedly. (General Motors has 10 UAW pensioner/shareholders for every active autoworker.)

The Occupiers need hardly add their voices to those from time immemorial against the hardy perennials among public grievances, such as age, sex, racial and orientation discrimination. And it is not clear what they are complaining about in respect of an alleged monopoly in farming, sophistical legalities, the sale of privacy of the public (as a “commodity”), “colonialism at home and abroad,” and “misinformation through control of the media.”

Less challenging to comprehension are complaints about torture and murder of prisoners and unspecified foreigners, and anger that student loans are not outright gifts, about the outsourcing of jobs, the nature and size of political donations, the alleged frustration of the development of alternative energy sources and the covering up of oil spills, and general complaints about Weapons of Mass Destruction.

This is the usual, incoherent, sophomoric grab-bag of populist grumbles, and there is some legitimacy to some of them. Also as usual, the protesters, led by the Canadian organization Adbusters and professional Canadian dissident Kalle Lasn, have been witty in sending up the pomposity of the system by adapting Thomas Jefferson’s Nuremberg-like indictment of poor old George III (but Jefferson’s blood libel on the American Indians that accompanied it) in the Declaration of Independence. It was a little like John Kerry’s anti-Vietnam protest at the Capitol in 1971, utilizing the most stilted Pentagonese jargon to describe demonstrations as “athwart hostile infiltration” of the Congress, and so forth.

Such an unfocused and scatter-gun assault is already pressing sympathetic buttons, and profiting from the usual heavy-footed public relations blundering of the municipal authorities and the straight-man impressionability of patronizing editorialists. Even New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, normally something of a fellow traveller with faddish protesters, has become quite belligerent, as he has paid for 10 years of municipal extravagance with the fiscal froth from Wall Street commissions and bonuses.

If the Occupiers and their organizers and spokespeople, including the capable Christopher Hedges (though he is now audibly verging on intoxication with the purple vapour of his own verbosity) and the unfeasibly abrasive Marxist mythmaker Naomi Klein, want to last more than a few weeks, they are going to have to do some strategic thinking and stop shouting long enough to acquire some tactical finesse.

To start, they must realize what they are opposing—there is no reason simply to excuse all student and other loans. The Occupiers don’t know anything about agriculture, privacy or colonialism. They would be insane to advocate unilateral disarmament, as the U.S. has used its WMD arsenal judiciously since (and before) Nagasaki; or to climb aboard the Global Warming bandwagon now that its wheels have left its axles in all four directions.

And they are going to have to do a lot better than their present counter-cultural, urban guerrilla reform plan: restoration of Glass-Steagall, more vigorous prosecution of financial criminals, reversal of the Supreme Court “Citizens” decision on electoral campaign financing by corporations, adoption of Warren Buffett’s tax proposals, restaffing and hyperactivation of the Securities and Exchange Commission, tighter rules against regulators becoming employees of those they formerly regulated, and the end of the “personhood” of corporations.

This too is just a rag-bag of simplistic liberal flummeries; Nancy Pelosi claptrap. An Occupation of Wall Street to monumentalize the already very imposing (at six feet, eight inches) Paul Volcker and to adopt the tax suggestions of one of Wall Street’s most ruthless and accomplished sharks, good old Uncle Warren in his viyella shirt and corduroy trousers (who paid less than $7 million on income of $63 million last year), is a piquant confession of the innocence of the Occupiers once they get south of Canal Street. And if they imagine that they are going to achieve anything desirable from the SEC, the supremely redundant appendix of American public life, or the under-worked, over- analyzed, colonnaded embourgeoisement of the American legal jungle complicit in the disappearance of the Bill of Rights into the sunset of simpler and more honest times, they are terminally naive.

Maybe start here…..

If the Occupiers want to be more than an evanescent magic carpet for a gaggle of hacks, gasbags and kooks, they will have to produce a leadership and a program worthy of being taken seriously as an alternative to what they are protesting against, and make alliances with other dissenters. Right now, they are just like the idiots who smash up the McDonald’s outlet at Davos each year, the anti-globalists at G7, G8 and G20 meetings, who are the football hooligans of political protest. They should stop invoking the fraudulent Arab Spring (now reduced to the massacre of Christians in Egypt and of Kurds in Syria) and attacking the Tea Partiers, who agree with them about bailouts, banks, monopolies and political corruption, and who got there first and have scores of congressmen and many millions of dollars. The Tea Party doesn’t have to try to run a Tentifada in Lower Manhattan to get any attention, and doesn’t need a publicity-seeking, gonzo, Marxist harridan like Naomi Klein as a drawing card.

They must leapfrog the Tea Party and not go to a war with it in a contest they can’t win. The Occupiers must recognize, as the Tea Party does, that capitalism is the only system that works, as it is the only one that conforms to the almost universal human desire for individual gain; and that the pursuit of gain will almost always, by its open-ended objective, lead to a crack-up eventually. Governments almost never have the least aptitude to deal with the resulting shambles, but there is no one else to do it, as governments make and enforce the laws, assess and collect and dispense taxes, and control the money supply.

The Occupiers must realize that they are not railing against a few crooked bankers and politicians, but against the American commercial, political, academic and media elites who have failed across the board. None of the central, lending or investment bankers, academic economists or financial media, or supposedly economically literate politicians saw this crisis coming, except for a couple of wingy professors and hedge fund managers, who took the concept of voices in the wilderness to Hansel and Gretel forest depths.

The Occupiers should denounce the shameful effort of the bipartisan political class to blame this mess exclusively on private sector greed, when it was the Clinton and Bush administrations that forced the financial industry into trillions of dollars of worthless real estate-backed securities in pursuit of higher family home ownership levels (and larger campaign contributions from the building trade unions and the real estate developers). The bipartisan political class had the brainwaves of outsourcing scores of millions of jobs while admitting tens of millions of unskilled, illegal migrants; and borrowing trillions of dollars from China and Japan to buy trillions of dollars of cheap and luxury goods (largely from China and Japan) that America formerly made for itself.

This was the strategic afterpiece of a country that had, in the two centuries from its founding in 1783 to the fall of the Berlin Wall, plotted and achieved a vertical and vertiginous rise from obscurity to global preeminence without the least precedent or parallel in the history of the world. This is the vortex the Occupiers seek to fill, and they won’t do it with Klein’s grating piffle; nor by importuning the SEC.

Even in the horrible year of 1968, scarred by the Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy assassinations, race and anti-war riots, and Vietnam, Lyndon Johnson, Robert Kennedy, Hubert Humphrey, Nelson Rockefeller, Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon were all, at one point or another, running for president. This year, as everyone knows, the likeliest challengers have passed and despite a very mediocre administration, there is no Democratic challenge to the incumbent as Gene McCarthy challenged LBJ in 1968 and Teddy Kennedy challenged Jimmy Carter in 1980.

The Occupiers should make common cause with the Tea Party and other reasonably sane protest movements. The way to cool out the obscene excesses of the financial community, and cut the domestic public sector deficit and unacceptable income disparities at the same time, is to tax optional financial transactions and certain categories of secondary financial income. The way to deal with poverty is with a self-reducing tax on very high individual net worths (let’s put Uncle Warren to the test). The tax could be accompanied by poverty-reduction programs designed and administered by the wealthy taxpayers themselves. The tax would eliminate itself as defined poverty was reduced and would directly engage the wealthiest people and most agile financial talents in the reduction of poverty, and give them an incentive to succeed. (Buffett’s proposals are a publicity stunt and if enacted, would not reduce the federal budget deficit by even one half of one per cent.)

Student and other loans should be restructured, the actuarial assumptions of Social Security adjusted, taxes simplified, labour strikes discouraged, and under-documented aliens enticed away from sub-minimum wage rolling of Hollywood tennis courts to win back jobs in simple manufacturing. (Whatever happened to Westinghouse alarm clocks?) And instead of grumbling about legal fineries, the Occupiers should demand the radical resurrection of the Bill of Rights that has been raped by lawless prosecutors with the fascistic plea bargain system, with the full complicity of the highest courts. The prosecutocracy should be put strictly back in its place and the addiction to over-sentencing, starting with the barbarism of the death penalty, should be reversed. The corrupt, misnamed (and decisively unsuccessful) War on Drugs should be ended, soft drugs legalized, treatment emphasized, and the laws applied equally to blacks and whites and poor and wealthy areas, and the effort to induce civil wars in other countries over supply (Mexico in particular) abandoned. The fable of global warming and the deranged nostrums that have come with it must also be abandoned.

A program including those elements would sweep the nation and impress the world. Christopher Hedges could think in these terms. If the Occupiers don’t have a burst of originality soon, they will be sent packing by the local police and will be neither remembered nor lamented.

The post Conrad Black on the 99% appeared first on Corporate Knights.