The average baby will go through more than 5,000 disposable diapers – 92% of which end up in landfills. But NappiCycle is finding new uses for soiled nappies. The Welsh company turns used diapers into carbon fibres that bind with asphalt to create roads twice as durable as conventional surfaces. Rob Poyer, a director of NappiCycle, gives the government much of the credit: “The Welsh government setting such high recycling targets has produced some amazing innovation,” and £180,000 in funding helped transform 100,000 diapers into a 2.2-kilometre stretch of road.

Norway dreams of electric gold

Having won the most medals at the 2022 Winter Olympics, Norway is now vying for another record: the first country to make the shift to fully electric vehicles. In 2021, 65% of new cars sold in Norway were EVs, up from 50% the year before. Only 8% of new vehicles ran only on gasoline or diesel; the rest were hybrids. Why is oil-producing Norway all-in on electric? The Norwegian EV Association cites the country’s high gasoline prices, the elimination of sales taxes and toll fees for EVs, and raising taxes on conventional cars as reasons EVs have taken off.

Coming to a table near you: Meat made from air

“Making meat doesn’t have to mean deforestation, factory farming, or greenhouse gases harming our planet,” claims California start-up Air Protein. The company has raised more than US$30 million to develop what it calls the first “carbon-negative, earth-positive protein source.” The recipe: mix high-protein bacteria in a fermentation tank with carbon dioxide, oxygen, water and minerals. Within hours, you have a protein-rich flour with twice the amino acids of soybeans. Air Protein is targeting various products but will enter the market with faux chicken. Where’d they get the idea? The process was first proposed by NASA in the 1970s to feed astronauts.

Ammonia awaits its moment in the sun (or wind)

You know ammonia as a household cleaning product – but the pungent compound of nitrogen and hydrogen is also a fertilizer, a solvent and an ingredient in food and medicine. Now scientists are studying “green ammonia” – produced using low-carbon energy – as a versatile fuel for power plants and motor vehicles. With wind and solar costs tumbling, green ammonia could find a role on farms as a fertilizer, an affordable fuel and an energy-storage medium more efficient than batteries. “For deep decarbonization of agriculture, you switch to green ammonia,” says University of Minnesota energy researcher Michael Reese, who’s running a demonstration project in Minnesota.

Solar will power Glasgow Airport’s net-zero pledge

How do you make air travel more sustainable? Glasgow Airport, the U.K.’s ninth-busiest airport by passenger volume, has just broken ground for a 30-acre, 15-megawatt solar farm that should go into operation next year. The airport already buys its electricity from 100% renewable sources, but building its own generating capacity will enable it to control its future as it replaces its service fleet with electric vehicles and overhauls its parking areas with charging stations. Glasgow Airport will also sell energy to its neighbours. While the airport hasn’t yet said how it plans to tackle Scope 3 emissions (those of planes landing and taking off in Glasgow’s airspace), it does hope to be a testbed for hydrogen and electric flights.

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Three gulps later, she renders a verdict: “It’s good. It just feels a little empty. Not because there’s no meat, but because there’s so much tortilla and not much inside.”

Every revolution has its setbacks – even the plant-based protein movement, whose sales in the U.S. are expected to quintuple by 2030. But demand could grow even faster as news spreads of a new study published in Nature that concludes veggie foods offer a “double climate dividend” that could save the planet. Not only will the environment benefit from lower carbon emissions as veggie proteins eclipse meat production, but the grazing land freed up by this movement could regenerate as woodlands that sequester much more carbon than they emit.

The first dividend is easy to understand. A plant-based burger from a company such as Beyond Meat or Impossible Foods carries a carbon footprint one-20th that of a beef burger (which includes not just the cost of animal feed, but all that methane produced by cattle digestion).

The second dividend was calculated by a group of seven environmental scientists from the Netherlands, Austria and the United States. They studied the potential environmental impact if the residents of 54 high-income countries adopted a flexitarian diet ideal for personal and planet health, consisting of vegetables, fruits, whole grains and plant-protein sources such as nuts and beans. (Dairy products and meat are included in this flexitarian diet, but limited to just one egg equivalent every other day and one medium-sized burger a week.)

Every revolution has its setbacks – even the plant-based protein movement.

The study found that adopting this “EAT-Lancet Diet” would enable countries to cut their agricultural emissions by 62% – a huge saving, given that food production accounts for about one-third of global carbon emissions.

The icing on the carrot cake comes from repurposing grazing lands. Globally, livestock occupy nearly 80% of agricultural land. The researchers say diet transformation would free up 4.3 million square kilometres (or 1.6 million square miles) of pasture – an area larger than the European Union. If this land were reverted to natural forest or grasslands, which absorb carbon from the air, the study estimates the carbon reduction could, over time, total 150% more than the savings attained through dietary changes alone.

Such a shift isn’t theoretical. World Animal Protection, an animal-welfare organization, announced recently that restaurant chains’ use of meat alternatives saved the equivalent of more than 700,000 animals in 2021. That’s 212,000 pigs, 92,000 cows and 405,000 chickens. The savings were based on previous findings that 90% of plant-based meals are bought by customers who would otherwise have ordered a meat product.

We’ve all heard the excuses why nations can’t meet their Paris Agreement commitments to carbon-dioxide removal (CDR). The double-dividend researchers say we can now put those complaints out to pasture. “Regrowth of natural forest is arguably the single most effective natural climate solution throughout much of the world,” they write. “Our results suggest that ecosystem restoration facilitated by dietary change alone could potentially fulfill high-income countries’ CDR obligations needed to limit warming to 1.5°C.”

Bring on the beans!

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Cut back on meat

The International Energy Agency (IEA) reports that agriculture is responsible for 40% of global emissions. Most of that comes from livestock. The IEA says that if wealthier households ate less meat, we could save one billion tonnes of methane by 2050.

Plug fuel leaks

Fossil fuels (oil/gas/coal) account for 38% of global methane emissions – (the IEA says methane leaks from the energy sector are about 70% higher than official figures). “If all countries adopted abatement policies, we could cut oil and gas methane leaks by half.”

Shut down coal

While burning coal creates 46% of CO2 emissions, coal mines are responsible for major methane leaks. China’s coal mines make the country the world’s largest emitter of methane.

The bridge is over

The EU is now rethinking its dependence not just on Russian gas after the invasion of Ukraine but on natural gas altogether as a “bridge” fuel. The European Commission has announced plans to speed up its transition away from fossil fuels by accelerating renewable projects.

Waste not

Rotting food and other organic waste created 20% of methane emissions in 2021. Minimizing food waste throughout the supply chain, as well as composting and using captured methane leaks from landfill to heat homes, can help curb emissions.

Goodbye, gas stove

Gas stoves in the United States emit 2.6 million tons of methane (the equivalent of 500,000 cars). We need more government incentives for homeowners who install electric appliances and bans on gas hookups in new developments (like those in New York City and San Fransisco).

Source: IEA (2022), Global Methane Tracker 2022, IEA, Paris

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Guliker wasn’t the only livestock operator hammered by the record flooding that ravaged B.C. last fall. An astonishing number of farm animals – at least 628,000 chickens, 420 cows and 12,000 pigs, according to the provincial government – died in the floodwaters. In all, about 200 square kilometres of southern B.C., encompassing the low-lying, fertile Sumas Prairie, flooded with upwards of 250 millimetres of rain a day. With more than $1 billion a year in farm-gate sales, the potential impact was massive not only for Abbotsford livestock operators but for fruit, vegetable and nut producers in the region.

Around the globe, the climate crisis is ravaging livestock farms. Last summer’s heat dome across much of western and central North America shrivelled crops and pastures, forcing farmers to send cows to slaughter before they starved. In California, ranchers have struggled to evacuate their herds in the face of record wildfires that have charred millions of acres of land the last few summers. In 2018 in North Carolina, about 3.5 million poultry and 5,500 pigs perished in flooding from Hurricane Florence. The costs are adding up: flooding in Nebraska wiped out US$400 million in livestock in 2019 alone.

What’s coming into sharp focus is that today’s livestock infrastructure is built for a climate that no longer exists. Farmers are facing enormous husbandry challenges trying to keep animals safe from extreme weather that brings floods, blistering heat and drought-caused feed shortages. Will barns have to be redesigned and fitted with expensive cooling systems? Might farmers have to create evacuation plans in case of flooding or wildfires? And what happens when their farms are destroyed and insurance companies deem them too risky to insure? A warming climate also attracts invasive new species, transboundary diseases and pathogens, further threatening animal welfare.

Dan Weary, NSERC (Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada) industrial research chair in animal welfare at the University of British Columbia, says that the November flooding saw remarkable feats of heroism as farmers tried to save animals under their care. “Farmers judge themselves in terms of being stewards for their animals,” says Weary. But the enormous loss of life and livelihoods signals that the agriculture sector must take stock in the coming months and look at redesigning farms to make them more resilient.

“This is going to be a perennial issue,” says Weary. Particularly since B.C.’s Sumas floodplain sits in what used to be Sumas Lake, before it was drained a century ago to take advantage of the fertile soil.

Sean Smukler, chair of agriculture and environment in the Faculty of Land and Food Systems at the University of British Columbia, says that if we’re not willing to invest in the costly infrastructure needed to prevent floods, we’ll have to take a different approach. That may mean shifting to flood-resilient crops, though for livestock producers in the region, the safest solution may be to move their operations altogether. It is going to be a “negotiation between society and producers, deciding whether or not we’re willing to pay the price to protect them,” says Smukler. “We need to pay more for our food if we want something that’s sustainable.”

This is going to be a perennial issue.

-Dan Weary, NSERC industrial research chair in animal welfare at the University of British Columbia

Camille Labchuk, animal rights lawyer and executive director of Ottawa-based non-profit Animal Justice, says that agricultural facilities need to be reduced in size to make rescue attempts viable, with farmers creating evacuation pathways and emergency stockpiles of food and water for the creatures under their care. Current animal numbers make this proposition questionable. Poultry facilities in B.C. have upwards of 54,000 birds per flock and seven flocks a year – an impossible number “to realistically plan to evacuate,” says Labchuk. In the United States, for example, poultry operations can house millions of birds, an even more improbable scenario.

Animal welfare laws also need to be revamped with disaster management in mind, adds Labchuk, pointing to late June’s farming disaster, when soaring B.C. temperatures killed more than 650,000 farm animals – mainly chickens packed into cages.

Livestock scientists suggest a different approach. Veterinarian Tim Kurt is the scientific program director of advanced animal systems at the Washington, D.C.–based Foundation for Food and Agriculture Research. He points to research focused on making animals more resilient so they can withstand weather extremes. The U.S. livestock industry loses upwards of US$2.36 billion annually because of heat stress: animals eat less (which impedes growth), produce less milk and become less fertile, says Kurt.

Studies are ongoing into nutritional interventions and supplements that specifically reduce heat stress in cattle.

Scientists are also looking at gene editing: identifying traits that enable cattle in places such as sub-Saharan Africa to endure drought and heat. African cows are typically inefficient milk and meat producers, and simple crossbreeding would produce an inferior animal. However, CRISPR gene editing, which allows the addition or removal of genes in living organisms, might be used to improve “the heat tolerance of the animal without impacting the milk production, which is what gives it great potential,” Kurt says.

Unlike other GMO manipulation, CRISPR uses genes from within the same species.

In 100 years, I expect there to be almost no animal agriculture on Earth.

-Lenore Newman, director of the Food and Agriculture Institute at the University of the Fraser Valley

Producers are also trying to keep their barns cool by using fans, misters, sprayers and evaporative coolers when temperatures soar. However, such measures increase water as well as energy use, bringing into question their sustainability in drought-strained regions. In an effort to convince more ranches and farms to switch to clean energy, the Rural Energy for America Program, which is administered by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, provides grants to help farmers and ranchers with energy-efficiency retrofits and renewable-energy development.

The irony is that animal production itself is fuelling climate change, creating 14.5% of global greenhouse gases, such as methane and nitrous oxide, according to the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization. “Animal agriculture is the lion’s share of food’s contribution to the climate problem globally,” says Lenore Newman, director of the Food and Agriculture Institute at the University of the Fraser Valley in Abbotsford. Newman envisions a future where protein is derived from plants, lab-grown meats and cow-free dairy. “In 100 years, I expect there to be almost no animal agriculture on Earth. If we can produce meat and dairy that’s identical for a lower price, that’s better for you and the environment,” she says.

What can be done for the immediate future? Amber Itle, interim state veterinarian for Washington, says that the agriculture industry in Canada and the United States must ramp up cross-border collaboration, including emergency preparedness efforts and coordinated responses to minimize the impacts of disasters like the flooding that struck the Pacific Northwest last fall. “We need to stop thinking about our border as a line that we can’t cross,” says Itle. “We should be prepared to employ new technologies, policies and tools on farms to help prevent, prepare for and respond to animal health emergencies and mitigate the impacts.”

Henk Ovink is the special envoy for international water affairs in the Netherlands. He says that it’s not just international collaboration but an alliance with Mother Nature herself that will be needed to control the repercussions of climate change. Low-lying Netherlands has taken land out of agriculture production, compensating dairy farmers for the property and moving their operations to higher ground. “I think it’s very simple: don’t even try to control nature,” Ovink says.

Back in Abbotsford, Baars’s farm eventually ended up underwater. While he managed to get his cows out in time, it was five weeks before he could resume full dairy operations, as he had to replace milking equipment rusted by flooding. Baars is apprehensive about the future. The flood, which was supposed to be a one-in-500-year event, “could happen again in six months,” he says. He doesn’t have a plan in place in case of another one.

“We are counting on our government to upgrade the dykes in our area. If there is another flood in the future, which is very possible, we hope to get more notice and will evacuate quickly,” he says. “We have to look to politicians and light a fire and say, ‘We gotta stop this.’ I wouldn’t want to see another flood, I can tell you that.”

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One disturbing consequence of the pandemic has been the mountains of single-use plastic it has generated.

In January, Tennessee-based Eastman Chemical unveiled a bold initiative to tackle this problem with plans for a US$1-billion plant in France that each year will turn up to 160,000 tonnes of plastic waste currently sent to landfills or incinerators into brand-new packaging and textile materials. Some of the world’s largest users of plastic containers, such as Procter & Gamble, Estée Lauder and Danone, have signed up as suppliers.

The French plant – like a smaller one under construction in Tennessee – will use Eastman’s polyester renewal technology, which breaks down hard-to-recycle carpets, textiles and containers into their molecular building blocks, then reassembles the material into new plastics. The company claims that the process can be used repeatedly on the same materials with no loss of quality. It estimates that the combination of its technology and France’s renewable energy resources will cut greenhouse gas emissions by 80% compared with other recycling methods.

The company’s head of plastics, Scott Ballard, told a Tennessee TV station: “What we’re trying to do is make it easier … for governments to create infrastructure to recycle.

Because with this technology, that waste becomes valuable, [so] we can pay money for it as a feedstock, as opposed to them having to pay to dispose of it.”

Eastman’s project, which will benefit from French government incentives, is an encouraging sign that the fight against plastic pollution is gathering steam. Last November, a study for the U.S. National Academy of Sciences estimated that the pandemic has generated more than eight million tons of plastic waste, mostly from hospitals.

More than 70 prominent consumer-goods companies came together in January to call for a global treaty to fight plastic pollution. The signatories, including Unilever, Walmart, Ikea and Coca-Cola, urged governments to adopt a wide range of policies to “keep plastics in the economy and out of the environment, reduce virgin plastic production,” and decouple plastic-production fossil fuels.

Such initiatives are sure to face pushback from powerful fossil-fuel and chemical industries that supply the raw materials for plastics. They would be wise to recognize, however, that the tide is not moving their way. Projects like Eastman’s will hopefully persuade businesses in many other sectors that the future lies in ever more efficient recycling.

Zero: Keurig

Speaking of recycling… Coffee-machine maker Keurig boasts on its website that by using its K-Cycle program, corporate customers can fully recycle every one of its single-use coffee pods. By 2020, the Massachusetts-based pioneer of single-serve coffee makers had diverted 136 million pods, weighing more than 2.7 million kilograms, from landfills by composting the grounds and filters and recycling the plastic and aluminum packaging.

But there’s a snag for those of us who use Keurig pods at home. The company reached a settlement with Canada’s Competition Bureau in January over what the bureau described as “false or misleading” claims about the recyclability of K-Cup pods. Under the deal, Keurig agreed to pay a $3-million penalty, donate $800,000 to a charity focused on environmental causes, and cover the costs of the bureau’s investigation. It must also reword its claims about the pods’ recyclability, and change their packaging accordingly.

Within a few weeks of the settlement, Keurig Canada had put up a banner on its website, noting that “Keurig K-Cup pods may not be recyclable in your area; check with your local municipality for more information.” A link gave more details of the settlement.

Alerted by researchers at the University of Victoria’s Environmental Law Centre, the bureau found that Keurig pods are not widely accepted by municipal recycling programs outside British Columbia and Quebec. It also concluded that Keurig’s claims give the impression that coffee drinkers can prepare the pods for recycling simply by peeling off the lid and emptying out the grounds, when, in fact, some recycling programs require more steps.

“False or misleading claims by businesses to promote ‘greener’ products harm consumers who are unable to make informed purchasing decisions,” noted Commissioner of Competition Matthew Boswell. Such claims, he added, also hurt suppliers of rival products that are less environmentally damaging.

Of course, Keurig is not alone in promising more than it delivers. The University of Victoria group found that Toronto’s solid-waste department recovers about 90 tonnes of coffee pods annually from a variety of brands that clog its recycling system.

The Competition Bureau’s statement announcing the settlement ended on a note of appreciation for the company’s “voluntary cooperation in resolving this matter.” Even better, Keurig and other pod makers could avoid the problem by making only refillable pods.

The post Heroes and Zeros: Eastman Chemical vs. Keurig appeared first on Corporate Knights.

The question is of long-running research interest to Olga Hawn, associate professor of strategy and entrepreneurship at the University of North Carolina’s Kenan-Flagler Business School.

“I have always been intrigued by the gap between what companies say and what they actually do,” says Hawn. Her previous research on corporate social responsibility found that investors, though initially skeptical, ultimately saw value in corporate commitments to sustainability.

Currently, she and fellow researchers are examining investor reaction to politically charged debates on racial and gender equality.

After the death of George Floyd in 2020 caused a global reckoning on race, roughly 100 Fortune 500 companies pledged action on diversity. Investors initially reacted negatively (a dip in share prices), fearing a corporate stance on a polarizing issue would be bad for business, according to research by Hawn and fellow Kenan-Flagler professor Stephanie Mahin.

I have always been intrigued by the gap between what companies say and what they actually do.

–Olga Hawn, associate professor at the University of North Carolina

But when they analyzed consumers’ sentiments about such pledges on Twitter, the researchers found that companies that demonstrated authenticity about their commitments fared better than those that appeared to make pro forma undertakings. The lesson for companies, says Hawn, is “Take a stand.”

A different pattern emerged in relation to LGBTQ2S+ rights. Hawn and Aharon Mohliver, a strategy and entrepreneurship professor at London Business School, tracked shareholder responses to American company rankings on the annual corporate equality index (a measure of social responsibility) between 2002 and 2018. Companies that clearly picked sides either way on gender equality won backing from like-minded investors, while those that stayed on the sidelines were ignored by investors.

“There is an advantage to [stating] your position either for or against,” says Hawn, which hints (pending further research) at the merits of corporate authenticity.

How do we propel companies beyond “islands of sustainability”?

Professor Christopher Wright recalls what he told his business students in 2006, when the British government released its influential Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change that called for environmental taxes: “The coal industry now is dead because the world’s economists have woken up, and we will price carbon emissions and it will be the end of fossil fuels.”

Wright’s assumption proved wrong, but it fuelled his interest in the “inherent contradiction” of companies that acknowledge the existential climate threat yet fail to respond.

“We keep doing what we are doing, which is to maximize shareholder value, continue economic growth and use coal, oil and gas to fuel all that,” says Wright, a professor of organizational studies at the University of Sydney Business School in Australia.

In his research, Wright examines a recurring pattern in which companies promise bold climate moves only for efforts to peter out because of bureaucratic inertia, pressure for quick profits and short-tenured leaders.

We keep doing what we are doing, which is to maximize shareholder value, continue economic growth and use coal, oil and gas to fuel all that.

-Christopher Wright, professor at the University of Sydney

Businesses alone cannot respond to climate action, Wright concludes. Despite some examples of what he calls “islands of sustainability” – businesses that pivot to a green focus – he notes “they can’t maintain the longevity because of the nature of the system.”

The co-author of Organising Responses to Climate Change: The Politics of Mitigation, Adaptation and Suffering, to be released this year, offers his admittedly unpopular remedy: global government intervention to price carbon and embrace renewable energy. “The problem is that the dominant political discourse is that government is the problem and let markets rule,” he concedes. “While we are in that fix, I don’t see any change happening.”

Still, he sees “pathways forward” through teaching and research to press for systemic change and equip a new generation of sustainability-conscious managers to reform corporate policies.

Wright, who uses op-eds, blogs, press interviews and social media to publicize his research, says academics in business schools and elsewhere need to “step out of the ivory tower and engage much more [than before] as public intellectuals” on the climate crisis. “It is bigger than a business case.”

A version of this story appeared in the spring issue of Corporate Knights magazine.

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But Johnson is losing his early lead. Spurred by growing electricity demand and the need to reduce its lethal pollution levels, the People’s Republic last year installed 17 gigawatts of new offshore wind power – more capacity than the whole world had produced in the previous five years. This expansion lifts China’s offshore energy capacity to 26 gigawatts, nearly half of the global total of 54 gigawatts.

These gains followed a “commissioning rush” of sustainable power projects motivated partly by China’s hosting of the 2022 Winter Olympics, which were purported to be run on 100% renewable energy. Previously, China had failed to meet a bold 2012 goal of building 30 gigawatts of offshore wind capacity by 2020.

Although offshore wind is now 30 years old, it still accounts for less than 1% of world energy production. Development has been slow because of perceived high risks, steep up-front costs and evolving environmental regulations. In China, officials have also had to overcome production-quality issues, connectivity problems and grid-capacity shortages.

Compared to the U.S. northeast coast, Canada has access to a much larger offshore area with stronger wind speeds.

-Martin Bush, a Toronto climate consultant

They persevered, because China’s electricity demand grew another 10% in 2021, and the country still depends on coal for two-thirds of its electricity. China ranks 11th on the World Health Organization’s list of nations with the worst air quality.

Happily, the International Energy Agency (IEA) reports that the potential for growth in offshore wind “is near limitless. Improved technology and steep cost reductions are putting more and more of that potential within our reach.” In 2019, the IEA estimated that offshore wind could generate 11 times more electricity than the world needs – a whopping 420,000 terawatt-hours of electricity per year. (But then, the same report predicted that China would require six years to overtake Britain as the world’s largest producer of offshore wind power.)

When news of China’s building boom leaked out, Sustainability Magazine called it “an impressive feat” that demonstrates just how underutilized offshore wind power is. While the U.S. lags behind, it has targeted 30 gigawatts of offshore wind capacity by 2030, gunning for 110 gigawatts by 2050.

It’s not too late for Canada to get in on the action. In January, Toronto climate consultant Martin Bush proposed that Ontario replace its aging nuclear reactors with offshore wind farms in Atlantic Canada, with the help of upgraded transmission lines linking Atlantic Canada with Ontario.

As Bush noted, “Compared to the U.S. northeast coast, Canada has access to a much larger offshore area with stronger wind speeds.”

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Just as vegan brands like Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods were surging in popularity at grocery stores and fast-food outlets across North America, the meat and dairy lobbies began taking aim at plant protein products. In 2019, Arkansas tried to make it illegal to call a veggie burger a “burger,” and Louisiana brought in the Truth in Labeling of Food Products Act. In 2020, Oklahoma enacted the Meat Consumer Protection Act, and most recently, legislators in Texas approved a ban on the use of “meat” and “beef” on the labels of plant-based food products. The laws are reportedly meant to protect consumers by ensuring that products derived from plants cannot be confused with those derived from animals.

Laurie Beyranevand, director of the Center for Agriculture and Food Systems at Vermont Law School, says much of the force behind these labelling laws comes from the meat, dairy and egg lobbies – or the so-called barnyard lobby. “They are all worried,” she says, and “the only legal hook they really have is to challenge the labelling.”

The Missouri Cattlemen’s Association helped draft the first law in the U.S. that banned companies from labelling products as “meat” that aren’t from slaughtered livestock and poultry. The Oklahoma Cattlemen’s Association also lobbied for its state law, to “protect consumers from confusion.”

“What we’ve seen is companies who are trying to deceive consumers with plant-based products and try to sell those products as a meat alternative, but not doing so with a clear labelling,” Michael Kelsey, executive vice-president of the Oklahoma Cattlemen’s Association, told High Plains Public Radio in 2021.

But are consumers really being misled? Research shows that letting plant-based food companies use words such as “beef,” “bologna” and “butter” to label their products doesn’t cause confusion among consumers. A 2021 study from Cornell University found that “consumers are no more likely to think that plant-based products come from an animal if the product’s name incorporates words traditionally associated with animal products than if it does not.” The study concluded that “omitting words traditionally associated with animal products from the names of plant-based products actually causes consumers to be significantly more confused about the taste and uses of these products.”

The only legal hook they really have is to challenge the labelling.

-Laurie Beyranevand, director of the Center for Agriculture and Food Systems at Vermont Law School

Turtle Island Foods, which goes by the name Tofurky Co., took both Missouri and Arkansas to court. The company was denied its bid at a preliminary injunction in Missouri but won in Arkansas. Said Tofurky CEO Jaime Athos in a statement after the law was struck down, “What’s really going on here is that the state of Arkansas is seeking to limit access to healthier, more sustainable food choices for its constituents, and it is doing so to benefit the animal agriculture industry.”

Tofurky Co. is now suing the state of Oklahoma over its labelling law, with the help of the Plant Based Foods Association (PBFA). Nicole Negowetti, vice-president of policy and food systems at PBFA, tells Corporate Knights that “attempts to restrict the labelling of plant-based foods are intended to curtail the explosive and sustainable growth of plant-based foods.”

Negowetti argues that having different labelling rules in different states also makes the sale of plant-based products unnecessarily burdensome. “Labelling restrictions are costly for plant-based food companies and present potential obstacles to consumer acceptance,” she adds. “If a plant-based food company is compelled to create custom labels on a state-by-state basis, they may be deterred from selling their foods in certain areas.”

In the last five years, American meat producers and lobby groups spent nearly US$23 million on lobbying efforts, according to OpenSecrets. Tyson Foods and WH Group, the owner of Smithfield Foods, the largest pork producer in the United States, top that list. Over the same period, dairy companies and associated lobby groups spent more than US$33 million on lobbying. Of course, both sectors lobby about a wide variety of industry-related issues, but a 2021 study out of New York University (NYU) found that between 2000 and 2020, meat and dairy and other agricultural sectors also invested US$750 million supporting campaigns of political candidates. The campaign of Republican Senator Deb Fischer, a rancher who introduced the Real Marketing Edible Artificials Truthfully (MEAT) Act in 2019 (it didn’t pass), received more than US$26,000 from the meat industry between 2016 and 2020, also according to OpenSecrets.

Notably, the meat and dairy lobby may now have additional support from the top. In February of this year, the U.S. Senate confirmed a new commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, Robert Califf, who during his nomination hearing was asked about plant-based alternatives using dairy terms. He responded, “There is almost nothing more fundamental about safety than people understanding exactly what they’re ingesting.” Within days of being confirmed in the role, numerous dairy industry groups offered public congratulations and urged the commissioner to help stop the “mislabelling” of dairy alternative products.

Attempts to restrict the labelling of plant-based foods are intended to curtail the explosive and sustainable growth of plant-based foods.

—Nicole Negowetti, vice-president, Plant Based Foods Association

The NYU study also found that 10 major meat and dairy companies engaged in research that minimizes the link between animal agriculture and climate change. Three firms – Tyson, Cargill and Smithfield – went even further, supporting “countermovement organizations” or similar groups that play down the link between agriculture and climate change.

Matthew Hayek, an assistant professor of environmental science at NYU, says the meat lobby is weaponizing research. He points to a growing number of researchers who have been funded by the meat, dairy and egg industries to conduct studies that question claims that plant-based foods typically come with a lower carbon footprint than animal products.

The meat, dairy and egg industry “is funding research directly, or funding researchers who are sympathetic to industry aims, or are antagonistic toward messages that defy industry interests like reducing [meat] consumption,” Hayek says. “Existing research is cherry-picked to develop and support industry narratives while ignoring other studies,” he adds. “This isn’t how science works.”

Nonetheless, some plant advocates believe that meat producers can be a positive force in this space. “Our pitch to the big meat companies is ‘Don’t be Kodak; be Canon,’” says Bruce Friedrich, founder and CEO of the Good Food Institute. “Don’t dig in on a 12,000-year-old technology. Embrace new ways of making meat.”

Friedrich says that he’s optimistic that he can work with the industry to transform rather than disrupt the way meat is made. “We welcome more plant-based options on the market to meet growing consumer demand,” says Negowetti. “All companies can play a role in creating a food system that’s fit for purpose.”

Jessica Scott-Reid is a freelance writer covering animal rights and welfare and plant-based food topics. She is also a co-host of the Canadian animal law podcast Paw & Order.

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Now that day seems to be dawning. It’s not the energy source that has changed; from as early as the Paleolithic era, humankind has exploited the heat within the earth for bathing and washing in hot springs. Now we know that constant energy source originates in the earth’s molten core, estimated to be 6,000°C, comparable to the temperature of the sun. That heat is a constant and, thanks to radioactive decay, expected to remain so for billions of years.

What has changed, however, is the state of technologies required to access that energy and, more importantly, a growing global consensus that, in an era of climate change, this low-carbon energy source needs to be fully exploited.

“Geothermal is the best of the renewables,” says Grasby. Unlike wind and solar energy, which are intermittent and require battery storage, geothermal can provide baseload power. It is also dispatchable, meaning that its generation can be calibrated according to demand, setting it apart from nuclear energy. And geothermal energy is incredibly diverse in its applications, with a spectrum ranging from electricity generation through direct heating and cooling systems, with additional possibilities for greenhouses, aquaculture and carbon capture.

Geothermal production is surging worldwide. Iceland, which began drilling geothermal wells in the mid-19th century, now heats 85% of its houses with geothermal heat and generates roughly a third of its electricity in geothermal power plants. Among the fastest-advancing geothermal countries are Turkey, whose geothermal electric production has increased 100-fold in the last decade, and New Zealand, whose volcanic zones currently supply 17% of its national grid.

The United States, blessed with the largest dry steam reservoir in the world – the Geysers of northern California – has the greatest total installed geothermal capacity, with 93 power plants generating 16.7 billion kilowatt hours of geothermal energy throughout the year. That’s still just 0.4% of American electric generation. In an effort to spur on the sector, President Joe Biden recently announced funding of up to US$20 million for projects that improve drilling efficiency, recognizing that geothermal’s heavy upfront costs are a major impediment to investment and growth.

In a world of steadily increasing geothermal capacity, Canada is often cited as a laggard. It’s the only country along the Ring of Fire – the belt of intense seismic activity that runs beneath the Pacific Rim countries – that has yet to feed geothermal power into its grid. But Canada’s negligible performance says less about a lack of determination or ingenuity than about geography and economics. And as the latter shifts – with the rising price of carbon (thanks to a national tax on carbon) and the surging cost of natural gas – Canada’s back-of-the-pack position is set to change. It is expected that Canada’s first commercial geothermal power project, developed by Deep Earth Energy Production (DEEP) in southern Saskatchewan, will be up and running by 2024.

“The potential here is huge,” says Grasby, and he would know, having spent the decade between 1975 and 1985 charting the country’s geothermal potential for the Geological Survey of Canada. The initiative was driven by the energy crisis of the 1970s and the resulting determination to reduce Canada’s dependence on oil. Research scientists drilled wells, and the first geothermal power was produced – but never connected to the grid. As the crisis passed and the price of oil sank, so too did enthusiasm for geothermal development.

It’s easy to be cynical about climate conferences and targets and posturing, but what I see happening with geothermal is really exciting. This energy transition represents the greatest economic opportunity in the last century.

—John Rathbone, engineering consultant

For 15 years, the results of Canada’s first geothermal program mouldered in garages and basements. But come 2000, with the rise in oil prices and a growing interest in renewables, Grasby was tasked with reassembling and digitizing the dusty data. The resulting 2012 report concluded that “Canada’s in-place geothermal power exceeds one million times Canada’s current electrical consumption” while also acknowledging that only a fraction of that power could realistically be produced.

To generate electricity from geothermal heat, a confluence of factors is needed: just the right temperatures, rock porosity and water pressure. In Canada, those conditions exist, deep in the volcanic rocks of the Pacific coast and the Western Canadian Sedimentary Basin that arcs down from the Northwest Territories through northern B.C., Alberta and southern Saskatchewan. But the question is precisely where they lie. The prohibitive expense of exploratory drilling nudges geothermal producers into collaboration with their wealthier energy cousins in the oil and gas sector.

Iceland now heats 85% of its houses with geothermal heat and generates roughly a third of its electricity in geothermal power plants.

“You’ve got a six-square-mile field that is surfacing hot water, 70-plus people who know how to work it, and over 60 years of historic data on its geology and chemistry,” says Lisa Mueller, CEO of Calgary-based FutEra Power, describing a typical legacy oil field in western Canada.

What many would see as a relic of the dirty energy past, Mueller sees as the basis of a clean energy future. Mueller is working on Canada’s first co-produced geothermal and natural gas power project. She expects the company’s pioneering plant, located in the Swan Hills of central Alberta, to be grid-connected by summer. Initially, two-thirds of the plant’s 21 megawatts will be derived from natural gas, and one-third from geothermal heat. But in a second phase, the plant’s hot water reservoir will be used to sequester carbon, and ultimately – Mueller predicts by 2025 – the plant will be operating at net-zero emissions.

Mueller, who once worked for oil behemoth Shell, has become a fierce proponent of low-carbon energy production. “It’s going to take an unparalleled effort to get us where we need to go,” she says. She’s convinced that the Swan Hills project will demonstrate a technical path forward for the oil and gas industry, in Canada and beyond. Grasby agrees.

“Geothermal presents incredible opportunities for Canada’s petroleum industry,” he says, adding that its geological knowledge and technologies will be key to geothermal development.

Beyond power production, geothermal energy is poised to play a significant role in Canadian heating and cooling systems. This makes good climate sense; while our grid is largely low carbon, thanks to an abundance of hydro and nuclear energy, Canada’s heating needs are currently met almost exclusively with fossil fuels. And those needs are great, accounting for some 60% of the country’s total energy consumption.

Sharleen Gale is Chief of the Fort Nelson First Nation, located in northeastern British Columbia and close to Clarke Lake, the province’s oldest natural gas production area. About a decade ago, as Gale was looking for economic development opportunities for her community beyond the depleting gas reservoir, an observation struck her. “When you drove along the pipeline,” she said, “you saw the melted snow all around it.”

For a remote, northern community, this seemed an incredible waste. Gale applied for a provincial grant to study the area’s geothermal potential, and now, with a major investment from the federal government, the Fort Nelson First Nation is using the Clarke Lake infrastructure – roads, well pads and wells – to develop a $100-million geothermal project that will not only produce power for the B.C. grid but also heat 14,000 local homes, as well as greenhouses to grow food.

Gale is hugely excited about what the Tu Deh-Kah (“water steam” in the Dene language) Geothermal project could mean for her community: energy self-sufficiency, food security and economic opportunity. With pride she explains that the project’s first two employees are community members who have returned to the remote First Nation following their university studies. “This project will protect who we are,” she says.

But the potential for geothermal heating in Canada is by no means limited to the North. Unlike geothermal power generation, which requires deep drilling to access temperatures upwards of 100°C, geothermal heating and cooling – also known as geo-exchange systems – involve lower temperatures, shallower wells and smaller bore fields. The idea is to create a kind of thermal piggy bank: sinking surface heat into the earth during hot months, to be extracted with pumps to heat buildings during cold months. The principle can be applied to single dwellings or at the “district” level of a university campus, condo development or subdivision. According to the Sustainable Technologies Evaluation Program, there are currently over 100,000 geothermal heating and cooling systems operating across Canada.

“This project will protect who we are.”

–Sharleen Gale, chief of the Fort Nelson First Nation, on the Tu Deh-Kah Geothermal project

The University of Toronto is building a geo-exchange system under its downtown campus, destined to be the largest of its kind in urban Canada and to reduce the university’s greenhouse gas emissions by 15,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent by 2024 – equivalent to taking 3,260 gas-powered cars out of circulation. According to John Rathbone, a Guelph-based engineering consultant, projects of this kind are proliferating across southern Ontario.

Rathbone runs a low-carbon energy consultancy, and in the four years of its existence, he has seen the interest in geo-exchange systems move from a climate-conscious, progressive fringe toward the bottom-line-driven centre. He attributes the shift to carbon pricing, the private sector’s growing commitment to ESG (environmental, social and governance) principles and the Toronto Green Standard, the city’s increasingly rigorous catalogue of environmental building standards, which is impacting development in other municipalities as well.

“It’s easy to be cynical about climate conferences and targets and posturing,” Rathbone says, “but what I see happening with geothermal is really exciting. I actually think this energy transition represents the greatest economic opportunity in the last century.”

Grasby shares his optimism. “Canada is on the cusp,” he says, citing the number of geothermal project “firsts” on the immediate horizon. He believes that once their success has been demonstrated, the investment floodgates will open and that if provincial governments create proper regulatory frameworks, Canada will enter what some are heralding as geothermal’s golden age.

Naomi Buck is a Toronto-based writer.

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But we didn’t.

Instead, pandemic-recovery stimulus packages totalling US$17.2 trillion provided more support for dirty industries than green ones in 15 of the G20 countries, including the world’s three largest economies – China, India and the United States, according to the Greenness of Stimulus Index calculated by consultancy Vivid Economics.

Not surprisingly, after energy-related global greenhouse gas emissions plunged in 2020 when much of the world hunkered down inside their homes, they surged back to record levels in 2021, with Chinese coal burning the biggest hole in our carbon budget.

Late in February, after the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued its grimmest report yet, the world’s top diplomat, UN Secretary-General António Guterres, was anything but diplomatic. He warned we are “sleepwalking to climated catastrophe,” describing the report as an “atlas of human suffering.” Nor did he mince words on who is culpable for “forcing the world’s most vulnerable on a frog march to destruction,” singling out the world’s biggest polluters and their underwriters for being “guilty of arson of our only home” and calling out the world’s leaders for their “criminal” abdication of leadership.

We can’t say we weren’t warned.

Back in 1988, at the first major climate summit (held in Toronto), world leaders said in their closing statement, “Humanity is conducting an unintended, uncontrolled, globally pervasive experiment, whose ultimate consequences are second only to global nuclear war.”

Speaking of which, the doomsday clock, maintained by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, is at 100 seconds to midnight – the closest it has ever been to apocalypse, and that was before Russian President Vladimir Putin, his pockets bulging with billions in fossil fuel revenues (more so after his invasion spiked prices), decided to invade Ukraine on the doorsteps of several NATO countries.
Personally, I would rather avoid cooking the planet while lining the pockets of petroleum pugilists like Putin, reckless enough to play chicken with nuclear bombs.

Fortunately, there is a way. We can stop burning fossil fuels; not immediately in one fell swoop, but rapidly in one decade.

We can save two birds (civilization and a livable climate) by dropping one stone (fossil fuels).

I would rather avoid cooking the planet while lining the pockets of petroleum pugilists like Putin, reckless enough to play chicken with nuclear bombs.

The people in charge of countries (more than 130 leaders, including the entire G20), financial houses (US$130 trillion worth) and corporations (more than 5,000, with a collective worth exceeding US$23 trillion) say they want to, all having declared they’re going to reach net-zero emissions by 2050 or thereabouts.

The solutions to getting off fossil fuels are on the shelf. We can decarbonize the grid and electrify almost everything with renewable electricity, batteries, electric vehicles and heat pumps.
And we have the cash to put the solutions to work, with households, corporations and governments holding US$510 trillion in financial assets like stocks, bonds, pension funds, and cash and deposits. That’s triple the amount of 20 years ago, and more than five times global GDP.

So what is the problem?

It’s a combination of inertia and vested interests who are perverting our political systems to protect their profits, which they care about an awful lot.

Our political systems are marinated in oil and cooked by coal.

Swedish youth climate leader Greta Thunberg and her peers continue to inspire, and we need more people in the streets, but for this to change we also need the captains of industry on the winning side of the energy transition to care an awful lot.

These leaders already have more economic clout than the losers do, and now we need them to assert their political clout to break the inertia and cancel out the delay tactics of the losers.

They have the long-term interest, practical know-how and economic credibility to do this, and their leadership would help to create space for a new generation of political leaders with conviction and clarity on what needs to be done, and the courage to do it no matter what.

On the 52nd anniversary of Earth Day, we are launching Earth Index as a fundamental metric to keep score on whether countries are reducing emissions fast enough to get where they promised to be by 2030.

Starting this year, we will work the Global 100 Most Sustainable Corporations in the World as a nucleus to illuminate this “say–do” gap revealed by Earth Index in the capitals of the G20, and what is required to close it.

As UN Secretary-General António Guterres put it, “Now is the time to turn rage into action.”

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