“Later this year we expect to finalize locations for Gigafactories 3, 4 and possibly 5,” CEO Elon Musk and CFO Jason Wheeler explained in a February note to investors. The new facilities are likely to be geared towards supporting Tesla’s highly anticipated Model 3 electric car, scheduled to begin production in July.

Gigafactory 1 is currently under construction outside of Reno, Nevada, although it is being constructed in phases that have allowed portions of the factory to already begin battery production. The second gigafactory is under construction in upstate New York, a product of Tesla’s recent acquisition of solar power installer SolarCity. Lithium-ion batteries being produced by the company are also slated to play an integral role in energy storage systems being sold by the company.

A range of different jurisdictions and countries around the world are competing to attract new Tesla factories to their shores, according to numerous media reports. Bloomberg reported last year that talks were underway between the Chinese government-owned company Jinqiao Group and Tesla over a potential factory in Shanghai.

Sveriges Radio P4 Väst in Sweden, meanwhile, learned in February of ongoing attempts by officials in Trollhattan to woo Tesla to take over an old Saab factory in the area. Several other western European countries appear to be in the mix as well. Other rumoured locations include India, Japan, Australia and another factory along the east coast of the United States.

The post Tesla planning additional gigafactories appeared first on Corporate Knights.

Anglo-Dutch consumer goods company Unilever announced a new transparency initiative in February intended to provide a detailed breakdown of all ingredients in each of its personal care products. Product lines include household names like Lever 2000 and Dove.

Current U.S. Food and Drug Administration requirements allow companies to substitute the word “fragrance” in place of listing the individual constituents that give each product its distinct scent, a loophole that has been in place for decades. Other product components not responsible for scent generation are still required to be listed on the label. The International Fragrance Association lists 3,059 materials and chemicals that are reported as being used in fragrance compounds. A number of these have been flagged by researchers as potential endocrine disruptors or linked to other adverse health effects. Industry groups continue to defend this practice as necessary for protecting trade secrets.

The action plan, scheduled to be in place by 2018, will require that Unilever personal care products list all ingredients above 0.01 per cent of the product’s total formulation. In addition, a new “What’s in our products?” section is being added to the company’s website, allowing consumers to access additional information such as descriptions of the development and manufacturing process involved. European regulations that require the labelling of enhanced fragrance allergen information will be voluntarily replicated for American products as well.

Environmental non-profits and advocacy organizations like the Washington, D.C.-based NGO Environmental Working Group (EWG) praised the decision as a consumer-friendly step in the right direction. The EWG produces a series of popular online guides to consumer product ingredients for personal care products and cleaning products, among other goods.

“With this impressive display of leadership, Unilever has broken open the black box of fragrance chemicals and raised the bar for transparency across the entire personal care products industry – and beyond,” said Ken Cook, president and cofounder of EWG. “It may not happen overnight, but Unilever’s watershed actions will place enormous pressure on the rest of the market to respond and make it very difficult for other companies to continue to shield their fragrance ingredients from consumers.”

Zero: Korindo

Palm oil and paper giant Korindo Group is being accused by environmental groups of violating an earlier promise to halt the conversion of virgin forest into palm oil plantations.

The South Korean company, a major landowner on the Indonesian island of Papua, had agreed to a self-imposed moratorium after an investigation by global campaign organization Mighty discovered it was responsible for the illegal burning of vast tracks of rainforest for palm oil production. The subsequent fallout resulted in calls for a boycott that lost the company some of its biggest clients, including major palm oil trading producers Archer Daniels Midland and Wilmar International. Mighty also began approaching clients of wind energy company Kousa, which is owned by Korindo, in an attempt to apply further pressure.

After denying the charges for months, Korindo reversed course last December and announced plans to follow the High Carbon Stock (HCS) approach – a methodology that helps determine which lands are of greatest ecological value. Activists were encouraged when executives from Korindo reiterated their commitment to reducing deforestation at a Jakarta meeting in late January, but efforts to secure an outside audit were rebuffed. A subsequent review of satellite images from December and January by Mighty showed that the company was preparing to clear an additional 1,400 acres of land by cutting them into plantation blocks, the final step before removal.

“We are very disappointed at Korindo’s duplicity, and urge them to immediately halt all further development,” said Deborah Lapidus, campaigns director at Mighty. “Because of its lies, Korindo is losing what little credibility it had, and serious scrutiny is needed: their sustainability assessments must be approved by the industry’s quality review panels before Korindo commences any further development.”

Korindo claims the moratorium was lifted after an internal HCS assessment was conducted, even though the results have yet to be audited by independent panels. This is an integral step in the HCS approach. While Korindo’s HCS review determined that 6,255 hectares of primary forest land on Papua owned by the company should be protected, an estimate by Mighty pegged this number at closer to 26,500 hectares.

The post Heroes & zeros: Unilever and Korindo appeared first on Corporate Knights.

Simon Lewis and Greta Dargie, from the University of Leeds and University College London, first stumbled across the peatlands in 2012 but grew convinced of the size of their discovery after identifying one of the deepest peat deposits in 2014. They have spent the past three years fully mapping the Cuvette Centrale peatlands located in the central Congo basin, ultimately concluding that they cover 145,500 square kilometres, an area roughly the size of Switzerland.

“We have also found 30 billion tonnes of carbon that nobody knew existed,” said Lewis. “The peat covers only four per cent of the whole Congo Basin, but stores the same amount of carbon below ground as that stored above ground in the trees covering the other 96 per cent.” The peatlands average a depth of 2.4 metres, but can go as deep as 5.9 metres in certain areas.

For the past 11,000 years carbon has been building up in the basin, now home to an estimated 30 per cent of worldwide tropical peatland carbon. Peatlands create a carbon-rich soil out of decomposing, waterlogged vegetation that acts as a carbon sink, temporarily locking away emissions first taken out of the atmosphere by the growth of plants until disturbed by changing temperatures, encroaching development or forest fires.

Discovery of this deposit makes the Congo one of the most important storehouses of peat carbon, after Indonesia’s vast stores.

The post Carbon sinking appeared first on Corporate Knights.

“While many countries will be undergoing a similar structural transformation, adapting to a lower-carbon economy will likely mean more profound structural changes for Canada than for many other countries,” Lane said. The country continues to be a major producer of fossil fuels, he explained, while our manufacturing sectors produce energy-intensive products like automobiles. “And Canadians use more energy per capita than residents of many countries, given the size of our country as well as our climate, living standards and lifestyles.”

But Lane also explained that inaction isn’t a viable option, with the negative effects of climate change set to rise to between $21 billion and $43 billion by the 2050s. “While the coming shift does present some unique challenges, Canada has shown an ability to adapt,” he said.

Much of this resiliency in the economy will need to come from small and medium-sized businesses, firms that do not have access to the same resources and capital as Canada’s largest companies. Four years ago Corporate Knights began the Future 40 ranking in an attempt to track which companies are successfully pivoting to this new low-carbon reality.

The firms on this year’s Future 40 are a cross-section of corporate Canada’s strengths, with fully a quarter coming from the mining sector. The world is counting on metals and materials coming out of this sector to meet the growing demand for renewable energy to help combat climate change, but will need to become much more resource-efficient and attuned to concerns about social licence if it is to survive and prosper.

Other sectors represented include medium-sized oil and gas players, which will be contending with carbon taxation in the years ahead. Several top universities also find themselves on the list, determined to lead by example as they equip the country’s future leaders with the knowledge and skills to succeed in a changing world.

Utilities also figure prominently, led by top-ranked Toronto Hydro Corporation. The city-owned utility has had success reducing its carbon footprint in recent years, including a 24 per cent decrease between 2014 and 2015. While some of this was due to the final phaseout of coal power in the province, other steps like decreased emissions from its vehicle fleet and facility retrofits also played a factor. The company has also made progress through a pilot waste reduction project that has increased waste diversion 19 per cent in the past two years.

Toronto Hydro rolled out a climate change adaptation road map in 2015, and has begun replacing infrastructure to increase resiliency with products like stainless steel submersible transformers. Along with teaming up with the city to install solar PV projects on municipally owned buildings, the utility has also moved forward on two promising energy storage projects – the HydroStor underwater compressed air energy storage system and an intelligent energy storage unit being developed by Electrovaya and a group of other partners.

Next on the list is the University of British Columbia, followed by Manitoba Telecom Services (which finished 6th on last year’s list). The top five is rounded out by Algonquin Power & Utilities, as well as the 2016 top company Horizon Utilities, which recently completed a merger with several other utilities in the region to become Alectra Utilities.

Although almost half of the Future 40 is headquartered in Ontario, companies hailing from six provinces are represented on the list. With a turnover rate of 27.5 per cent, a number of new companies surged into the ranking this year including Kruger Products, McGill University and Entertainment One.

Click here to go back to the ranking landing page.

The post The Future 40 turns four appeared first on Corporate Knights.

And the announcement came on the back end of the single most energetic year for climate policy in the country’s history. Trudeau had recommitted Canada to the UN’s international climate action process in Paris, brokered a deal with all 12 provinces and territories to put a price on carbon, and introduced a nationwide phaseout plan for coal-fired power. After this, he hands the oil sands industry free rein to add another 600,000 barrels per day to the export of its already massive carbon footprint?

Partisans on either side of the narrow Liberal centre on the issue immediately broadcast their outrage. Left-wing critics and environmentalists labelled the Trans Mountain approval a betrayal of Trudeau’s Paris promises and a negation of any real action his government had taken – or ever would take – on climate change. Condemnations and cries of confusion rained in from outside Canada as well, as the American and European climate advocates who’d fallen in love with Trudeau’s dynamic Paris leadership wondered how he could have strayed from the path so far and so quickly. Political opponents on the right and in some sectors of the oil and gas business, for their part, accused Trudeau of shallow political theatre, posing as a friend of the industry to win a few Red Tory votes by pretending to put his weight behind a project his environmentalist allies would surely block. And he did so while overruling the National Energy Board on another pipeline, Northern Gateway – a move without precedent, even if it applied to a project few still believed was viable.

Who was the real Trudeau? Was he a climate crusader or an industry shill? Which side was he on? The answer is both, or perhaps neither. Trudeau’s Trans Mountain approval – and the political calculus behind it – was a rejection of the idea that he or any other Canadian must choose from two diametrically opposed sides. It was an embrace of the ambiguity of Canada’s relationship with its extraordinary natural bounty, its longstanding dual role as both a ravenous natural resource economy and a proud environmental steward. The pipeline approval, in the Trudeau government’s estimation, was a necessary trade for the broad support it needed to move forward on climate change on other fronts. Trudeau was, if nothing else, thoroughly Canadian in his decision.

The paradox of these custodial and exploitative approaches to the environment is as old as Canada. The voyageurs, middlemen in the fur trade upon which colonial Canada’s economy was first built, were both skilled wilderness explorers and harvesters of animal pelts. Cod fishermen had to intimately understand the sea and its raw, brutal power in order to pull fish from it by the boatload. Loggers on the Ottawa River or in the British Columbia wilderness, western settlers living off of and clearing prairie land to prepare it for farming, gold prospectors in the Klondike, oil sands pioneers punching holes in the boreal forest – all of them became intimate with Canadian nature even as they transformed it from ecology to commodity.

For the first three centuries or more of European settlement in Canada, there was nothing understood to be contradictory in this relationship. The idea of nature as a storehouse to feed human needs and treasure trove to feed human ambitions was a pillar of western civilization. If not for fur and fish and logs, gold and wheat and nickel and uranium and oil – if not for commodities, why would anyone have established a colony or founded a nation here?

Even Canada’s first national parks – beginning with Banff, established in 1885 – reflected this dual role. It was understood by the government of the day that parkland was being set aside both for its aesthetic and ecological merits and for its natural resource value. Until the 1920s, the shores of Lake Minnewanka in Banff National Park were home to a thriving coal-mining camp. Only with the National Parks Act of 1930 did resource development start to be restricted in Canada’s national parks.

As a collective ecological consciousness rose and environmentalism emerged throughout the industrialized West in the years after the Second World War, Canada found a tenuous but manageable balance between its resource development economy and its increasingly stewardship-minded civil society. Guided by a series of broadly liberal governments and managed by a professional, evidence-driven bureaucracy, Canada’s resource economy girded itself with environmental assessments and regulations understood to be as smart and stringent as any in the world.

What’s more, Canada came to be seen as a leader in the emerging political art of reining in an industrial economy’s environmental oversights and excesses. Research conducted in the 1970s and 1980s at a small but globally influential field laboratory called the Experimental Lakes Area, operated by the federal government in northern Ontario, drove international initiatives to reduce water pollution from phosphates and the air pollution causing acid rain. When scientists discovered a huge and growing hole in the earth’s ozone layer, Canadian researchers and bureaucrats were so central to the response that the ensuing global ban in the manufacture of ozone-depleting chemicals would be named the Montreal Protocol. And in civil society, the global environmental movement traces its origins in significant part to a small gang of Vancouver activists, whose “Don’t Make a Wave” campaign against nuclear weapons tests in the Pacific Ocean morphed into Greenpeace, one of the first environmental groups with truly worldwide reach.

Canada’s resource economy, of course, remained far from benevolent in its environmental impacts. Overfishing off the Atlantic coast, in part owing to the federal government’s willful ignorance of its own best science, would lead to the catastrophic collapse of the cod fishery. Nickel mining turned the landscape north of Sudbury, Ontario, into a barren wasteland so similar to the surface of the moon that NASA used it for field training. Clearcut logging of old-growth forests on the west coast left a global stain on the nation’s reputation. And Canada was home to the same smoggy mix of coal plants and steel foundries and aluminum smelters as any advanced industrial economy.

Still, in the main, Canadians thought of themselves as the good guys on the environmental front, striving often as not for a respectable middle ground – a prosperity built on the nation’s extraordinary natural bounty that took the necessary steps not to exhaust it in the process. We were voyageurs in canoes making an honest living, not Hudson’s Bay factors plundering the wilderness. We were loggers dancing lightly atop felled trees on the river, just like in the National Film Board cartoon, not pulp mill operators dumping effluent into it. Beaver dams, the echoing call of a loon, a game of shinny on a frozen pond or a cottage on a lake – our symbols and myths placed us unobtrusively in the foreground of a tranquil wilderness, if we appeared in the scene at all.

“A Canadian is someone who knows how to make love in a canoe,” Canadian author Pierre Berton once said, and we like to nod along even though more than three-quarters of us live in urban environments clustered around industrial cities built on the proceeds of natural resource extraction and export. We are a population still not far removed from the “hewers of wood and drawers of water” whom the Canadian historian Harold Innis lamented in his 1930 history of the fur trade. “We live to survive our paradoxes,” the latter-day Canadian mythmaker Gord Downie sings, hinting at the internal contradictions we’ve carried along with us in our figurative canoes for centuries.

When climate change began to emerge as a substantial environmental issue in the late 1980s, Canada’s initial response was to extend its expertise in environmental research and stewardship to the newest challenge of the day. The first major international meeting of climate scientists was hosted by the Mulroney government in Toronto in 1988, and it led directly to the Rio Summit in 1992 and from there to the Kyoto Protocol, a solution surely as noble and final as the Montreal Protocol.

Climate change, however, was not the product of a refrigerant manufactured by a handful of chemical companies. It was pervasive, universal and ongoing, emergent everywhere and visible nowhere, at least at first. It was caused – was being caused, day by greenhouse-gas-emitting day – by almost every single thing citizens of an industrial economy like Canada did from the moment they left home in the morning to drive to work until they settled back in at night, warm in homes heated by natural gas and lit by lamps often powered by coal. And Canada, it turned out, was one of a handful of the most egregious contributors to the great emissions bonfire, our carbon footprints swelled by homes in need of heat, great distances in need of crossing and fossil fuels in search of profit. Our national footprint was among the half dozen largest on earth in per-capita terms.

Climate change has called into question the very foundations of Canada’s economy, spilled sand in the prosperous lubricant of its placid civil society, smeared and distorted the symbolic good guy image in the national mirror. In response, Canada has grandstanded, backtracked, equivocated and dissembled. The federal government of the 1990s under the Liberals signed on to the Kyoto treaty but did nothing to fulfill its demands. Under Stephen Harper’s Conservatives, one of the world’s most spitefully reactionary governments on the climate change file, Canada became a global poster child for the cause of the crisis. And now, under Justin Trudeau, it attempts to stare itself full in the face of climate reality’s mirror for the first time.

There remains an impressive side to that image, tarnished though it might be. Trudeau’s Liberals have worked with provincial governments across the country to usher in a nationwide end to coal-fired electricity and a national carbon price, finishing projects begun by the governments of Ontario and British Columbia during the reactionary years in Ottawa. These are major steps, as bold and unprecedented in their leadership as the Montreal Protocol and the acid rain treaty of yore, placing Canada among the front ranks in climate change action.

But then there is the lingering legacy of all those resource-driven years of prosperity, which has come to be embodied by the oil sands industry in northern Alberta, and especially in the pipelines that carry the bitumen produced there to ports and international markets. The oil sands were, for nearly a century, a national project seen as all upside. Here was the world’s third largest oil reserve, and a technological challenge in turning it into a commodity that fired the Canadian engineer’s imagination and employed its skilled workers the same way national railroads or the forestry business once did. Researchers from both the Alberta and federal governments had been mucking around with bitumen in the boreal forest since the 1920s. Alberta’s government ushered the first oil sands mine to completion in 1967 and joined with the federal and Ontario governments to provide almost a third of the capital needed to build the second one. Well into the 1990s, even as climate summits began to make headlines, the industry enjoyed financial support and enthusiastic partnership from government and the public at large. Canada – in the broadest collective sense, in whatever way we are all one – is as fully dug in on the production of oil sands crude as it has been in any of its resource projects. As we debate our entire national commitment to climate change action through the proxy of an oil sands pipeline project or two, we should remember every one of us has had a hand in getting the bitumen into that pipe.

Canada will not solve its own greenhouse gas conundrum – let alone the world’s – simply by deciding whether or not to continue to extract 2.4 million barrels of oil per day from Alberta’s oil sands, whether to increase that amount by another million or two or whether to reduce it to nothing as fast as possible. This is not the entirety of our climate change problem, nor even the majority of our emissions. It is, however, the ideological battle that might well define who we are in the climate change era. And it may well be that we remain as we have always been, prosperous and exploitive, broadly well-intentioned and guilty of egregious environmental sins.

The post Two shores away appeared first on Corporate Knights.

As sesquicentennial events take place around the country in 2017, Canadians have been struggling with how best to approach this milestone. One major concern being raised is that the outpouring of patriotism and celebrations risks ignoring the ghosts of our past, papering over the problems of today and sidelining the narratives of marginalized people.

This is particularly true when it comes to the country’s indigenous population.

Small but admirable attempts to decolonize our collective history have emerged in places like Vancouver, which has branded its anniversary events “150+” as an acknowledgement of the time before settler contact. Visitors have flooded in to see Cree artist Kent Monkman’s art series “Shame and Prejudice: A Story of Resilience” as it travels across the country. The exhibit showcases a collection of his paintings, which use the aesthetics of traditional Western neo-classicism to challenge the Euro-centric narrative of Canada’s colonial past and to confront the impact of this colonial story on Canada’s indigenous peoples.

At Corporate Knights we wanted to use the anniversary to reflect on how nature shaped and continues to shape European-led settlement of Canada, and vice versa. Author Chris Turner delves deep into these issues here, highlighting the dissonance behind Canada’s professed love of nature with the extractive industries that built and continue to shape it.

A corollary of this investigation is what impact Canada’s indigenous peoples have had in directing this relationship between resource development and nature, and the lives changed as a result.

There’s little doubt that aboriginal peoples living across what would become Canada – a collection of groups encompassing myriad languages and landscapes – each developed forms of subsistence living over thousands of years that were unique to each local environment. The land was often modified and manipulated to meet their needs, but in a way that was broadly self-sustaining.

European settlers came to this land with a different vision in mind, principally motivated by the allure of natural resources on offer. This wasn’t entirely one-sided, as aboriginal people became an integral part of the burgeoning fur trade. But it ended up transforming both the state of the natural environment and their relationship to it.

As settler populations multiplied and moved west into the 18th and 19th centuries, their supposed need to displace the inhabitants grew more acute. Primary industries that fuelled the growth of modern cities like fishing and logging were not simply happened upon, but were wrestled away from local populations whose lifestyles and cultures were deeply intertwined with them.

Anthropologist Joanne Hammond and others have taken to photoshopping B.C.’s historical signs as part of an imaginary Department of Uncolonial History. One series focuses on B.C.’s salmon fisheries, where commercial canneries in the 1870s displaced indigenous fisheries reliant on sustainable practices honed over millennia. Indigenous peoples were banned from commercial fishing and further exploited in their factories while stocks were nearly destroyed through overfishing.

As Turner outlines in his piece, Canada’s first national parks like Banff were not purely born out of an early desire to protect the natural environment but also as a continued source of resource development. But developing the park itself required the exclusion of the Nakota First Nation from its traditional resource-gathering territories.

At the same time, environmental historian Nancy Langston has warned, embracing a declensionist narrative also has its dangers. “Nature and aboriginal peoples alike come across as victims with minimal agency”… nor does it “engage with enviro-technical change, the history of science, gender or the nuances of aboriginal history and power.”

To take this a step further, author John Ralston Saul argued in his book A Fair Country that Canada is a Métis nation that has been heavily influenced by aboriginal ideas. Perhaps Canada’s relationship to its natural environment, as outlined by Turner, has been more influenced by its first permanent inhabitants than we think.

Environmental history is a burgeoning field, especially when it comes to assessing indigenous people’s place in it. It’s a subject we plan to revisit later this year.

The post Editor’s Note: Everywhere and nowhere appeared first on Corporate Knights.

Economists broadly agree that carbon pricing is the preferred method for reducing emissions with the lowest economic cost, but resistance to the idea at the federal level has led to the territory being seceded to the governing Liberal party. As Republicans learned repeatedly during the Obama era, while failing to engage constructively on controversial issues can be a political winner it often leads to “worse” policy outcomes (from a conservative perspective).

This has not been the case at the provincial level, where former B.C. premier Gordon Campbell’s 2008 revenue-neutral carbon tax has been widely viewed as a success story. The Progressive Conservative premier of Manitoba, Brian Pallister, is in the midst of designing a carbon pricing system that will likely be revenue neutral, and Ontario Progressive Conservative opposition leader Patrick Brown has made similar pledges.

Conservative MP Michael Chong, known as a more independent-minded politician than most, is bucking his federal counterparts by making his “revenue negative” carbon tax plan the centrepiece of his leadership campaign. The Wellington-Halton Hills MP has outlined a detailed plan to introduce a national carbon price that would reach $130 a tonne by 2030, and which includes a restructuring of the tax code to ensure the plan acts as an overall tax cut. Corporate Knights recently caught up with Chong to discuss the proposal in greater detail:

CK: You’ve been busy making the conservative case for carbon pricing across the country.

Chong: The most economically efficient way to reduce emissions, the cheapest way to reduce emissions and the most conservative way to reduce emissions is through a revenue-neutral carbon tax. This allows government to harness the power of free markets to reduce emissions, while at the same time shrinking the size of government by phasing out various green regulations, programs and subsidies as the carbon price rises.

The second point is that my plan for a revenue-neutral carbon tax is one of the largest income-tax cuts in Canadian history, an $18 billion cut that we would deliver in our first budget of spring 2020 that would actually leave more money in the pockets of Canadian consumers and Canadian companies. It’s an income and corporate tax cut that is worth almost 1 per cent of GDP. It’ll be one of the largest income tax cuts in Canadian history.

CK: There’s a shifting landscape for conservatives regarding carbon pricing across the country when it comes to provincial leadership – embodied by Brian Pallister in Manitoba and to a lesser extent Patrick Brown in Ontario. How do we turn this into a debate over the best way to institute carbon pricing, not whether or not to have it?

Chong: Well I think the debate as to whether we should have a price on carbon is over. Carbon pricing is here to stay; it’s been in place in Quebec and B.C. for almost a decade. I believe my plan is the right way to proceed. The wrong way is a cap-and-trade system, where the government spends a portion of the revenue on government programs. So that’s, I think, a very important point.

To your earlier question, I would also add that increasingly, conservatives are starting to understand that a revenue-neutral carbon tax is the way to go. Gordon Campbell had a piece in the Calgary Herald recently endorsing this and pointing to the successful policy he implemented in B.C. about 10 years ago. Even the Fraser Institute now supports the B.C. carbon tax. In fact, if you google it, on the Fraser Institute’s website there’s an article titled “Cheap: The B.C. carbon tax, but only if it’s revenue neutral,” showing that it’s managed to grab a broad spectrum of support.

So this revenue neutrality is not only economically important, but it’s also politically important. We need to have broad public support to reduce emissions, so delivering rebates and tax cuts to offset the price of carbon is incredibly important.

CK: Why did you release such a detailed plan? Leadership races are often littered with vague ideas and concepts.

Chong: Leadership races are the time to have big debates on policy, not the third week of a federal election campaign. If you’re going to have a debate on party policy and on taking the party down a new path, you introduce a policy far in advance in a leadership race, where the merits of the policy can be debated.

I think that this is a political winner for conservatives, one of the critical elements that we need to have in place to win the 2019 election. If you look back at history, the Conservative party was the party of anti-free trade from John A. Macdonald onwards. In the 1983 leadership race, one of the debates centred on free trade. And one of the candidates, John Crosbie, proposed to change party policy and adopt a pro-free trade stance, and four years later it became party policy. Brian Mulroney campaigned in the 1988 election on free trade, won the election on that issue and the rest is history.

For me, this is a similar landscape. We are confronted with one of the biggest challenges that this country faces, which is how to reduce emissions without harming our economy. I don’t think the current federal government or Ontario’s government is taking the right approach on this. I think British Columbia’s $30 a tonne revenue-neutral carbon tax is the right approach, and what I’d like to see is the B.C. model applied across the country.

We need to be part of this debate and helping to shape it. Conservatives have the most to contribute because it’s conservatives that believe in the power of free markets, and by coming forward with a credible policy to reduce emissions that’s based on conservative principles, free markets and smaller government, we can provide a path forward that will allow us to reduce our emissions and grow the economy at the same time.

CK: Let’s get into the specifics of your plan.

Chong: Justin Trudeau’s government has put in place a $10 per tonne price on carbon starting in 2018, and increasing at $10 per year until it reaches $50 per tonne by 2022. My plan mirrors that approach, but where my plan differs is in three aspects: First, my plan continues out until 2030, when it will hit $130 a tonne, because that’s the number we need to achieve in order to meet our Paris commitment to reduce greenhouse gases by 30 per cent. I think that only planning until 2022 is a fault in their plan, because companies need time to prepare. It’s a big shift in our economy, and the longer time horizon we can give companies to plan for the shift, the better. The current government wants to stop at 2022, and it’s unclear what is going to happen after that.

Secondly, my plan has a federal component and a provincial one as well. Trudeau’s plan is entirely provincial, with all revenues from the $50 per tonne collected by the federal government returned to each province. My plan splits the economy into two. On the consumer side of the economy, the provinces would get the first $30 per tonne, and the federal government would get the next $100 per tonne. That’s why, on the consumer side of the economy, it’s a combined $130 per tonne.

On the other side of the economy are the large emitters – the oil and gas sector, export-oriented and trade-exposed industries and other large emitters in the country. Here, the provinces are expected to collect all of the revenue. These targets are intensity-based, so while they too will be at $130 a tonne by 2030, that price will be applied on a sliding scale of increasing intensity targets. So the reason why that’s done is because they’re trade exposed, and they need time to adapt to these new prices in order to ensure that we don’t negatively impact their ability to export.

CK: Output-based subsidies for large emitters play a key role in the Alberta carbon pricing plan that went into effect in January, and seems to have been an important reason why Suncor and other oil sands players have been supportive thus far.

Chong: My plan syncs with provincial plans with respect to the oil and gas sector, other major emitters, and other trade-exposed, export-oriented industries.

Now there’s also a third difference and this is possibly the most important one: My plan mandates revenue neutrality for the $100 per tonne federal carbon tax, and it incentivizes provinces to make their carbon pricing schemes – whether it’s a cap-and-trade system or a carbon tax – revenue neutral as well. It does this through a revenue-neutral carbon incentive, a new federal transfer that would be given annually to provinces that have used their carbon revenues to cut income taxes or provide direct rebates to consumers and to companies. It would be the equivalent of 10 per cent of the provincial income taxes for rebates provided, and would be a permanent transfer.

So, for example, if a province has $1 billion in carbon revenue, and they’ve used all that revenue to cut provincial income taxes, we will transfer, on a permanent basis, $100 million a year. And this will serve as an unrestricted transfer – they can spend the money on whatever they wish. On the federal side, the carbon tax is strictly revenue neutral and all the money will be used to cut income taxes, and on provincial pricing schemes it provides a significant incentive for provinces to move towards revenue neutrality.

Now this issue of tackling climate change by reducing emissions is more and more an economic issue, and how we do this is turning into more of an economic question than an environmental one. We are a 750-megatonne economy, roughly. On the current government’s plan, by 2022 we are looking at approximately $37.5 billion in carbon revenues, whether through a cap-and-trade system or carbon tax. This amounts to almost 2 per cent of our GDP, a huge chunk of change, and if even a portion of this revenue is spent on government programs, we are going to put a huge burden on Canadian consumers and companies.

But if they are used instead to introduce deep income-tax cuts, we could actually grow our economy while reducing our emissions. Because if we take the latter approach, we are in fact achieving an economic outcome that governments have long tried to achieve: to shift taxation away from income taxes towards other forms of revenue such as consumption taxes.

CK: The biggest argument put forth against revenue neutrality – or, in your case, an overall reduction in revenues – is that carbon pricing, while an important pillar of tackling climate change, needs to be combined with an additional suite of policies, regulatory reforms and investments to transform sectors like transportation.

Chong: Well, I think they’re wrong. History proves that government is terrible at picking winners and losers, and we just need to look to Ontario’s Green Energy Act as evidence. It’s not an efficient way for resources and capital to be deployed when governments are making decisions. I think the free market is very efficient at supplying capital in the most efficient and productive way possible, and that’s why I think the arguments against a revenue-neutral model don’t hold up. It also has the added benefit of offsetting some of the increased costs associated with burning fossil fuels through deep income-tax relief.

This conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

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Although gender has been the key dimension for diversification in the U.K. and North America, there are other ways to approach the issue.

In Germany and other continental European countries, one form of board diversity has been baked into corporate structures for many years. The system of codetermination brings worker representatives onto boards, ensuring the voice of workers is heard alongside that of management and shareholders.

“This is a different way to get diversity onto the board and prevent group-think,” says Markus Roth, a professor at Phillipps-University Marburg in Germany and expert in European corporate governance.

Although the diversity it brings may be a fashionable benefit, codetermination was not designed with that in mind. Rather, it has its roots deep in the corporatism and cooperative model that has underpinned German businesses for more than a century.

There has been recent interest in this model from some unexpected quarters in the past year. Most notably, Theresa May, then home secretary of the United Kingdom,  proposed introducing European-style worker representation on boards. This proposal was one plank of her successful campaign to become Tory leader and de facto U.K. prime minister.

“We’re going to have not just consumers represented on company boards, but workers as well,” said May during her leadership campaign. Once established as prime minister, however, she dropped this idea in favour of less radical ways to give voice to employee concerns.

Nevertheless, with increasing interest in responsible investment comes increasing interest globally in how companies can be made more responsive to the needs of stakeholders other than their shareholders.

Modern German codetermination structures are based on a law from 1976, the Mitbestimmungsgesetz, and are embedded in a two-tier board system. Between a third and half of a supervisory board (Aufsichtsrat) must be employee representatives, although the chair of the board is always a shareholder representative. The Vorstand, or management board, is answerable to this supervisory board and must also include an employee representative.

Sitting slightly lower in the corporate hierarchy is the work council (Betriebsrat). This group is present in almost any German company with more than five employees and has broad consultation rights to influence working conditions, pay principles, working time and so on.

Although worker representatives at both levels frequently have ties with trade unions, they are not officially there in trade union roles.

Opinion is divided on whether codetermination is a good thing for businesses and economies. Some academic studies find it has no effect, others that it has a small positive effect on innovation, investment and productivity. It is credited with having cushioned the German economy from the impact of the global financial crisis, as companies were able to negotiate either temporary layoffs or shortened hours for employees during the hard times. This created goodwill and resilience to recover when the economic climate improved.

Because it leads to better communication between C-suite and shop-floor, codetermination leads to less working time lost to strikes, as well as creating a more loyal workforce, limiting the costs of worker turnover.

Yet the clearest evidence of a codetermination effect is economy-wide: it appears to correlate with lower levels of inequality.

Unsurprisingly, studies have found that short-term shareholder value may be negatively impacted by codetermination. This occurs as “labour succeeds in altering the objective function of the firm – away from maximizing shareholder wealth.” In other words, employee representatives will prioritize the interests of workers over those of shareholders, leading to higher staffing levels and lower valuations of companies with higher levels of worker representation at board level.

Even if codetermination was important to the impressive post-war growth of the German economy, it is arguable that its importance may be declining in a 21^st century context. The smaller and mid-sized companies that drive much of the growth in modern economies are exempt from the codetermination law, and Germany has struggled to develop as successful a service industry alongside its manufacturing economy.

So, would there be any value in introducing German-style codetermination in other jurisdictions?

David Pitt-Watson, a leading practitioner in the field of responsible investment and business practice, is ambivalent.

“It seems to be quite successful there [in Germany], which I guess calls into question those who think it would be a disaster elsewhere,” he says. But the specific model is based on the two-tier board, he points out, which would require root and branch change of North American corporate structures.

“Good systems of corporate governance, like good systems of democracy, can be framed differently in different countries, so sometimes cannot be readily imported,” he continues.

The German system has a very particular history with roots as far back as the attempts of the Prussian state under the Iron Chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, to improve worker-employer cooperation in the 19^th century.

All of the codetermination structures, customs and legislation that had developed by the 1930s were torn down by the Nazi regime. But after the Second World War, the Allies (in particular the U.S.) promoted the development of trade unions and workers’ councils that can be seen as leading to the modern system.

Post-war Germany was ripe for establishing codetermination, since workers had relatively strong status in comparison with the corporations tainted by association with the Nazi regime. The historical context also meant the push to nationalization of the industries seen in the U.K. at the time was absent following forced nationalization under the previous regime.

Other countries, particularly across Europe, have other forms of codetermination. The Netherlands, which also has a two-tier board system, provides for employees to elect up to a third of the supervisory board members. The difference from Germany is that those members must not be employees or trade union members.

Swedish employees are represented on the unitary boards of that country, with those representatives elected by workplace unions, while in France employee representatives can be elected either by the workforce or by employee-shareholders. In either case, they are unlikely to make up a significant proportion of the board.

Each model is a product of its country’s history, proving Pitt-Watson’s point about the specificity of democratic and governance models, but they demonstrate that codetermination is an entirely workable concept in a market economy.

In North America, the primacy of shareholder interests has been unquestioned for many years.

Perhaps it is time to consider how it might be possible to change the nature of corporate governance to include stakeholders other than shareholders in the supervision of company behaviour. Codetermination offers one possible solution.

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About 28 per cent of Canada’s emissions come from the transportation sector and of that about four per cent is from railways.

Canada’s freight rail industry says it has reduced its greenhouse gas (GHG) intensity by about 40 per cent since 1990, while increasing its workload (measured in revenue tonne kilometres) by 83 per cent, according to the Railway Association of Canada (RAC), which represents the passenger and freight industry, including leading players such as Canadian National Railway (CN) and Canadian Pacific Railway (CP).

“We really believe that railways are part of the climate change solution,” says Michael Gullo, RAC’s director of policy, economic and environmental affairs.

The drop in GHG intensity is driven in part by new technologies that help to monitor and curb fuel consumption, as well as operational efficiencies such as running longer trains and putting a locomotive at both the front and in the middle to maximize power and velocity. Some of these efficiencies are part of the so-called “precision railroading” model, which includes cost cuts and improved service, pioneered by well-known industry executive Hunter Harrison, the former CEO of both CN and more recently CP.

The federal government has recognized the environmental advantage of rail, calling for a shift in the transport of goods from truck to rail as part of its economy-wide target to reduce GHG emissions by 30 per cent below 2005 levels by 2030. Transport Canada is also working on new regulations, in consultation with the industry and environmental groups, to reduce locomotive emissions under the Railway Safety Act. The government says it’s the first time it will regulate air pollutant emissions from locomotives.

Though railways may not be the main target of environmentalists seeking ways for Canadian industries to clean up their businesses, some pressure is being applied. The biggest issue is the use of diesel fuel to power locomotives. While rail companies are considering natural gas and other alternatives, the cost of upgrading infrastructure is a major challenge – particularly for the freight rail industry given the geography it has to cover.

“That’s a future potential,” Barry Prentice, a professor of supply chain management at the University of Manitoba’s I.H. Asper School of Business, says of the alternative fuels.  “We’re not at that stage yet … It’s one of those yet-to-be-developed opportunities.”

Good business sense

Canada has the fifth-largest railway network in the world, or more than 44,000 kilometres of track used to transport about $280 billion worth of freight each year, according to RAC. That’s about five million carloads. Rail can move one tonne of freight more than 200 kilometres on a single litre of fuel, it says, the equivalent of removing more than 300 trucks from the highways.

Gullo says Canadian freight railways strive to operate “as efficiently as possible” by operating 24/7, 365 days a year, maximizing long-haul movements and train lengths and consolidating traffic flow. That helps to reduce fuel consumption and, in turn, lessens its GHG intensity.

“It makes exceptionally good business sense,” Gullo says. “The better railways are at minimizing the amount of fuel they use, the lower their GHG portfolio is,” he adds. “There is a natural incentive to use your fuel wisely now. It’s not like the days of old.”

Gullo says the railway industry see itself as a “highly efficient, low-GHG opportunity for driving down emissions in the transportation sector.”

It’s also a “ready-made opportunity” for the federal government to consider as part of its climate change strategy, he says, adding that Canada would reduce its emissions by 3.7 million tonnes annually if it moved 10 per cent of truck traffic to rail.

RAC is calling on the government to invest more in rail infrastructure and technology to reduce fuel emissions, and recommends that revenues collected from carbon pricing programs be directed to rail, similar to what the Quebec government has done with its Green Fund.

“As a critical component to growing the economy, and with a long-standing commitment to reducing emissions, Canada’s railway industry can deliver prosperity while becoming part of the country’s climate change solution,” RAC said in a submission made last year to Environment and Climate Change Canada.

RAC says it’s in talks with the federal government to extend a memorandum of understanding (MOU) for reducing emissions, which expired last year. Gullo says the industry is hoping to negotiate a longer-term agreement that is aligned with Canada’s 2030 emissions target.

Transport Canada says the Canadian rail industry has been voluntarily reducing emissions through agreements dating back to 1995 and expects the MOU to be renewed. It also expects to finalize updated locomotive emissions regulations this year.

More innovation needed

Canada’s rail industry “deserves some credit” for its work so far in reducing emissions, but more can and needs to be done, says Steve McCauley, senior director of policy at Pollution Probe.

“Fuel switching is where the biggest priority should be,” McCauley says. “That’s where the industry is going to have to be innovative.”

Pollution Probe and other environmental groups say the rail industry will need to invest in technology and alternative fuels if it wants to reduce emissions long term.

“Natural gas, whether it’s compressed or liquefied, is a potential short-term opportunity, but that still doesn’t get towards zero,” said Eli Angen, Ontario director of the Pembina Institute. “We have to be looking at things like biodiesel, hydrogen and electric.”

Railways are working on a transition away from diesel-powered locomotives to alternative fuel sources such as liquefied natural gas (LNG), but the pace is slow.

According to RAC, as part of a pilot study from 2012 to 2013, CN was the first railway in North America to pioneer an LNG-powered locomotive that moved freight between Edmonton and Fort McMurray, Alberta.

In its recent submission to the federal government, RAC says long refuelling processes and higher-than-expected maintenance costs, as well as a drop in diesel fuel prices, “have stalled the mainstream application of this technology in the railway sector.”

Railways were ahead of the transportation sector in moving to more efficient diesel, says Prentice. That’s why he’s optimistic they will continue to work on reducing their environmental impact.

“The railways really have the potential to be zero-carbon emission,” he says, adding it just may take some time – especially for the freight rail industry.

He notes that all trains are electric, but the electricity just happens to be generated through the use of diesel.

“The difficulty for the railways of going straight electric is the cost of all of the infrastructure required,” Prentice says.

The size of the country doesn’t help. Electrification is more doable for passenger rail, given the market is usually more contained to a particular region. It’s why, for example, Via Rail is working on installing electric-hybrid trains in the busy Windsor-Quebec City corridor and the Ontario government is eyeing electric GO trains in the Toronto-Waterloo Region corridor.

Still, Prentice says, “the incentives are aligned” for the freight rail industry to continue to pursue low or zero emission solutions in the future.

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Some numbers suggest we’re hard on the accelerator toward a battery-powered future:

• Seven years ago, only a handful of EVs roamed the world’s roads; today, it’s nearly 1.3 million.
• Global EV sales soared 60 per cent last year from 2015.
• The number of EV models available in North America has leapt from two to 30 since 2011. Europe and China are keeping pace.
• Thirteen automakers now offer EVs compared with just two in 2010, and several plan to spend billions of dollars to expand their battery-powered lineups.
• A forest of charging stations, most crucially the DC fast chargers that replenish a battery to 80 per cent capacity in about half an hour, are popping up around the world.

Other figures, though, point to a steep, slow climb:

• Those 1.3 million EVs are less than one-tenth of one per cent of the planet’s cars and light trucks. Even the 2016 sales boom raised EVs to just one per cent of the new-vehicle market, despite generous incentives – including up to $14,000 in Ontario.
• Only in Norway (23 per cent), the Netherlands (10) and California (3) have EVs begun to reach a critical mass.
• The 30 EV models in North America pale in comparison with the nearly 300 that burn fossil fuels – and only 10 of the 30 are widely available.
• EVs are still more expensive than equivalent internal-combustion vehicles and, excepting the $100,000-plus Tesla Model S and X, those that operate only on battery power offer too short a range to suit most drivers.

Forecasting EVs’ future is fraught with uncertainties. Analysts must evaluate potential changes in costs, technology, incentives, fossil-fuel prices and regulations, as well as how all these elements might interact. Given these unknowns, they are navigating partially blindfolded, at best.

Predictions are complicated, too, by the different EV types they assess.

In conventional hybrids (HEVs), the battery doesn’t plug into the electricity grid for a recharge and the electric motor merely assists internal combustion. Plug-in hybrids (PHEVs) have bigger batteries, rechargeable from the grid, that propel the car for most daily commutes; internal combustion fuels longer trips. In battery-electrics (BEVs), only the battery provides fuel.

Most analysts assume manufacturers will produce more HEVs for a few years to assist in complying with current fuel-economy regulations, but that they’ll soon become obsolete. PHEVs, they say, will persist longer as a stopgap until the truly important transformation, the shift to BEVs. Still, most combine PHEVs and BEVs in their forecasts.

Predictions cover a wide range of possibilities.

British research company IDTechEx is among the bulls, enthusiastically forecasting that cars and light trucks powered only by fossil fuels will be defunct in 2035.

The middle ground includes many, such as the International Energy Agency, who predict EVs will account for 30 to 40 per cent of new-vehicle sales by 2035 to 2050.

At the conservative end, forecasts – often connected with the oil industry – suggest EVs will account for only about 10 per cent of sales by 2035 or 2040.

Perhaps the surest indication of interest in EVs is automakers’ increasing commitment.

In the race that matters most – increasing BEV sales – competitors must catch Tesla and General Motors, whose latest models are considered game changers, offering the first affordable, long-distance battery power.

Affordable and long-distance, though, are relative terms.

GM’s Bolt starts at about $35,000 (U.S.), before incentives, and boasts a range of up to 383 kilometres. Tesla, which has poured $5 billion into its Nevada battery gigafactory, promises its Model 3, due by early next year, will offer a 346-kilometre range and start at about $37,000.

Apart from a few luxury models, BEVs are small, and even with extremely generous incentives cost more than equivalent internal-combustion models. And while the Bolt and Model 3 boast twice the range of first-generation BEVs, they still lag internal-combustion vehicles.

But manufacturers are pushing hard, though keeping their plans vague because they rarely discuss future products.

GM’s CEO Mary Barra said at the recent North American International Auto Show in Detroit that the Bolt would be the platform for “a huge range of (electric) vehicles.”

Ford Motor Company is investing $4.5 billion to create 13 new global EVs by 2020; albeit a mix of conventional hybrids, PHEVs and BEVs – at least one of which aims to be a Bolt-beater, with a range up to 480 kilometres.

Mercedes-Benz and BMW say EVs should account for up to 25 per cent of their sales by 2025.

The Volkswagen Group will spend billions to create up to 30 EV models by 2020. Its Audi subsidiary promises a new EV annually, starting next year.

Volvo, owned by China’s Zhejiang Geely Holding Group, promises two BEV models by 2019 as part of a plan to sell at least one million by 2025.

Nissan, which led the way to BEVs with its Leaf, promises a new version in 2018 and has showed a 400-kilometre concept. Honda has unveiled a concept small, boxy, battery-powered utility vehicle, the NeuV.

Hyundai recently introduced its Ioniq line, which includes a PHEV and BEV, and already plans to boost the BEV’s range from about 200 kilometres to 300.

Jaguar’s I-Pace, a luxury SUV due next year, will be the company’s first BEV.

Even Toyota, which although a pioneer in hybrid technology has focused on fuel-cell development, and Mazda, which once declared itself too small to get involved, are designing BEVs.

China’s BYD, the world’s leading BEV manufacturer, also makes electric buses and trucks. It is creating new models in its home country, plans to build two battery bus factories in Latin America and is considering U.S. BEV sales.

In Europe, the head of Opel is mulling making the brand all-electric after its previous owner, General Motors, agreed to sell the company to France’s PSA Group in March.

And from outside the auto industry, Apple and Google are reported to be developing BEVs.

These plans would lead to EVs having a small but decent market share by the mid-2020s. Beyond that, though, can dramatic price and performance gains make them mainstream?

Signals are mixed. Research around the world, combined with mass production and economies of scale, has slashed the cost of lithium-ion battery packs from more than $1,000 (U.S.) per kilowatt/hour in 2010 to around $250.

Most analysts say $100 per kilowatt/hour would vault EVs to about 15 per cent of new sales. At the current rate of cost decline, battery makers would hit that number in a couple of years. But the rate is slowing as researchers struggle with new chemistries and designs that seem to generate as many problems as they solve. Thus, a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency analysis predicts a price of about $140 by 2025.

At the same time, battery performance has soared. Energy density – the amount of energy stored in a certain weight of fuel – has climbed four-fold since 2010.

There’s still far to go. A typical lithium-ion pack is remains just one per cent as energy-dense as gasoline, and a recent report from the Argonne National Laboratory, near Chicago, forecasts battery packs won’t match gasoline until 2045.

But here, too, complexity makes forecasts tough. Batteries don’t need to equal gasoline’s energy density to be as efficient and effective. Losses in the engine and powertrain mean internal-combustion engines convert no more than 40 per cent of their fuel energy to driving power. Batteries and electric motors are at least 90 per cent efficient. On the other hand, batteries’ immense weight eliminates much of their efficiency advantage.

Current evidence suggests government regulations and purchase incentives are crucial to EV sales.

Incentives must be very generous. Even Ontario’s subsidy – among the world’s richest – hasn’t pushed EV sales above one per cent in the province.

Norway illustrates the scale required. Its incentives exempt EVs from the European Union’s 25-per-cent value-added tax, as well as hefty Norwegian vehicle taxes based on weight, cylinder count, horsepower and carbon emissions. In addition, EV owners enjoy free parking in municipal lots, exemptions from ferry and road tolls, reduced annual road taxes and free battery charging.

These measures, which essentially equalize the price of similar EVs and internal-combustion vehicles, have helped EVs achieve their 23 per cent market share. But total BEV and PHEV sales have plateaued and BEV sales are down nearly 40 per cent this year. Norwegians are opting instead for plug-in hybrids, particularly the Mitsubishi Outlander, a sizable SUV.

China is providing a good test of incentives. EV sales there have skyrocketed, rising 50 per cent in 2016 with a 58-per-cent gain forecast this year. But those sales are propelled by massive subsidies, which are to be phased out by 2020. Whether market demand sustains the momentum remains to be seen.

Regulations must be stringent. Current fuel-economy standards in North America, Europe, Japan and China force manufacturers to produce more efficient vehicles. But real change demands laws like California’s that require automakers to sell a certain percentage of zero-emission vehicles if they want to do business in the state. Nine other U.S. states have adopted California’s regulations, and manufacturers have built vehicles to comply. Most early BEVs were created as “compliance cars,” available only in the zero-emission states and just in large enough numbers to meet the standard. Even with that push, though, and the biggest U.S. incentives, EV sales capture only three per cent of California’s market.

Quebec has a similar rule. Next year, 3.5 per cent of a manufacturer’s sales there must be EVs, including hybrids. That number gradually rises to 15.5 per cent in 2025 – a big jump from the current 0.5-per-cent share.

Technology advancements are key, but uncertain. The optimistic forecasts assume far more efficient battery chemistries will supplant lithium-ion. But no one yet knows what those might be, or when. It’s simply an article of faith.

IDTechEx bases its rosy BEV outlook on the assumption that by 2035 we’ll drive “energy independent” vehicles with on-board recharging – perhaps with yet-to-be-invented, super-efficient solar panels.

Again, the direction is clear; the speed uncertain.

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