There really is something quite equanimous in the way Garcetti talks about the deep political rift in the United States over low-carbon energy. Garcetti currently serves as chief ambassador for global climate diplomacy at C40 Cities, an international network of nearly 100 mayors committed to advancing climate action. He served as the group’s chair from 2019 to 2021, during the last part of his nine-year tenure as L.A.’s top official.

Garcetti is on a mission to remind the world that President Donald Trump doesn’t have the last word on the state of climate action in the United States, nor is he the most reliable authority. If you pay attention only to the current administration, you’re missing the bigger story about where climate adaptation and mitigation are headed in the world’s largest economy, Garcetti says.

We spoke with Garcetti about the power of cities and states to implement the green transition, how climate communications are evolving, and why Washington can’t stop the low-carbon economy.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

MARK MANN: Are you building a parallel order of climate diplomacy?

ERIC GARCETTI: Look, we know that things like a pandemic and disease and certainly climate, these things don’t care where we draw borders between cities or countries. It demands a diplomacy that also doesn’t ignore borders but works across them, and that’s really what we’re doing.

MM: You’re here at the Montreal Climate Summit with Gina McCarthy, chair of the America Is All In coalition and former climate adviser to President Biden, who argues that Trump’s power to stymie climate action is exaggerated. I’ve noticed it in the media, that sometimes Trump’s attacks are much more amply covered than the rebuttals. What’s going on there?

EG: Well, go to your business model: what generates clicks is conflict. But at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter what generates clicks; what matters is what generates electricity in a sustainable way. Wind might be controversial in one project off the coast, but meanwhile, take Texas. It’s a very conservative political state right now, run by Republicans, and they’re decarbonizing the Permian Basin, the largest oil field in America, primarily with wind and solar. Maybe they don’t brag about it because it doesn’t fit their politics, but they’re not stopping.

MM: Do you take a page and talk less about climate?

EG: Yeah, not because of Trump, but because I think “climate” is an abstract word for many people. Climate literally means weather. It doesn’t have a value to it. Climate isn’t environmentalism or green, and those things, while they were good early on, were too segregated. You felt very special if you were a green activist or if you worked on environmental issues, when it requires a billion people to be incorporating sustainable values.

I like talking about jobs, health and safety. And in the face of extreme weather and climate change, we have communities that don’t feel safe because of floods and fires and everything else. The economy is rapidly changing, and so responding to what’s happening requires us to retrain people and to generate jobs through the work that needs to be done.

MM: What’s the best evidence, in your view, that climate action is still winning in the United States? That the momentum is still there?

EG: Sometimes there are setbacks that reduce the acceleration, but there’s nothing that’s reversing the direction. You read headlines and you think, “Oh, people are going backwards.” No. Coal plants are still being shut down, even if the president is trying to save a handful of them over the wishes of the actual power companies that own them. We are seeing the more conservative states – like, 70% of the new [low-carbon power] installation was done in Texas, Ohio and Florida, all run by Republican governors.

California continues that. Los Angeles, the largest municipal utility, is still on path to be at 97% carbon-free power in four years – it’s so exciting to even say that – and 100% by 2035. Transportation investments are continuing. The number-one car sold in California is still an electric car.

It’s hard to find a measure where we are moving backwards. When you look at capital flows, too, there’s never been more deals at a better price than right now. When I talk to investors, they’re like, “Maybe we don’t talk about it as loudly, but in some ways all that shouting coming out of Washington has helped us find even better deals.” Everybody knows it’s the cheapest way to get power. It’s the best way to move forward with transportation. It’s the healthiest thing to do for communities. We struggle to find evidence against it, [despite] what the White House claims.

MM: Do you think energy is shifting to the local level? Is there any sense that the centre of gravity is moving away from federal politics?

EG: No, I don’t think many people ever cared what Washington was doing, even when they might be pro–climate action. I mean, there have been moments, like when Joe Biden passed the Inflation Reduction Act. That was huge. It was the biggest piece of environmental legislation ever passed by any nation. But they also knew that if you could add up all the local and state money spent, it would dwarf [the IRA]. We’re the ones who maintain sewer systems, who do private investment, build houses. We invest and build our transportation networks. In America, most spending on climate-related sectors is done at the sub-national level. I think anybody who has been active has always known that’s where the fight is.

MM: In Canada, cities can be disempowered relative to the provinces. Often there’s a dynamic where politicians at the provincial level gain more power from rural voters than from urban voters. I’m wondering how powerful cities really are?

EG: It’s different from state to state, but in the United States, big cities have tremendous power, whether it’s formal or informal. Even if you’re a drop of blue in a red state, the state leaders know they need to have a Houston work, or Atlanta work or Nashville work. There’s often political conflict, but when it comes to spending money and getting things done, it’s the same voters and the same people who are demanding answers.

I also think that urban–rural divide is disappearing a little bit based on some issues. For instance, data centres are being built in the most rural areas and the most urban areas. And people are like, “Whoa, why are my energy bills going up 20% in a year? What is the impact of having this around me? How are we actually generating that electricity?” Folks who might not have in the past cared about whether it was coal or gas are suddenly questioning, “Do I really want that, just to help an AI system develop?” In urban areas, they’re finding new coalitions between people.

The majority of people really do live now in urban areas in America, overwhelmingly. Depending on how you measure it, up to 80% of Americans live in cities. So that is allowing cities to hit above their weight class, even if they don’t have the formal power. They really have the influence, even sometimes when they’re led by people from a different party.

MM: I don’t know if people are still talking about “abundance” as much, but I’m curious if you think that’s the type of shift that we need?

EG: I’m not a huge fan of the word “abundance,” because what does that mean? It’s another one of these academic-sounding words. But making shit easier to get done: yes.

There are some basics we should never, ever sacrifice. But we’ve put so many boulders in our backpack, it’s so slow to move. For instance, imagine a New York subway system getting built in this day and age. It would take 100 years to build that, and it would cost a trillion dollars.

RELATED POSTS

How to scale up the green economy

The world is blowing past 1.5°C of warming. The reckoning has only just begun.

U.S. states and cities are building a parallel system for climate diplomacy

I’ve become simultaneously more progressive and libertarian as I age. Libertarian, like, get the hell out of the way. Get the basics covered, but let people do stuff because there’s a crisis. And more progressive: make sure it has a conscience. Don’t just let bad design and capital flow in however it wants. But if you let capital flow in in a predictable way, there are smart ways to be both progressive and caring, but also a little bit more libertarian and less regulatory.

MM: Do U.S. mayors who engage in the C40 or in other types of sub-national climate diplomacy face threat or pushback from the federal government?

EG: Yeah, when they’re not focused on something else, like wars in the Middle East or going after our immigrants. It’s somewhere in that agenda. It’s not frequent, and it’s not a friendly partnership, but [Washington doesn’t have] a lot of tools. They can’t tell Los Angeles “You can’t create renewable energy for your energy mix.” They can’t write our building code. They can’t tell us where to invest our transportation dollars.

There are moments when federal funds would be useful, and can help accelerate the greening of our ports, the building of more public transportation, the environmental-justice issues of restoring communities cut up by bad infrastructure decisions, and that’s frustrating at times.

But no, I think that there are bigger targets that they have their attention on. And we actually welcome collaboration with them. If you can get past some of the fixations they have, whether it’s offshore wind or this, that and the other, there are opportunities for America to be strong and have jobs the same way that Prime Minister Carney is talking about. This is the age of more national sovereignty, reshoring jobs. I’d love for us to be talking about in the United States, as Canada is doing, really being one of the green manufacturing hubs that can export to the world. Don’t cede that to China, as marvellous a job as they’ve done. They shouldn’t be creating every future car. We should have Canadians and Americans that build cars, but it’s probably not going to be an internal combustion engine 20 years from now. So we’re going to lose a decade by winding away all those subsidies. And we’re going to be behind the eight ball for a long time.

Mark Mann is the managing editor of Corporate Knights. He lives in Montreal. 

The post U.S. climate action isn’t stopping appeared first on Corporate Knights.

The couple took the plunge and bought the 12-acre property, armed with the proceeds from the sale of the studio and a guiding philosophy: “We wanted to create a place where people could simplify.”  

Today, the Anupaya Cabin Co. is a well-tended wildernes retreat with eight renovated cabins and spectacular views of the towering Laurentian Mountains and surrounding forests. The couple seeded an apple orchard, planted vegetable and herb gardens, and built a chicken coop.  

As many as 5,000 guests come every year for the usual reasons: to escape the daily grind, paddle the river and hike through the woods. But they also undertake tasks that many vacationers might find unappealing: removing invasive plant species, collecting eggs, helping harvest crops. Visitors are encouraged to replenish and revitalize the land, a new approach to destination travel known as regenerative tourism. 

Like sustainable tourism, regenerative tourism aims to minimize the industry’s negative impact from environmental damage as well as the social toll on local communities from over-crowding. But where sustainable tourism mainly guards against resource depletion, regenerative travel seeks to actively restore and regenerate ecosystems, cultures and local economies. 

The Journal of Responsible Tourism Management notes that regenerative tourism often emphasizes opportunities to heal tourist destinations. 

British Columbia’s Maple Leaf Adventures, which offers small-scale expedition cruises to the Gulf Islands, the Great Bear Rainforest and southeast Alaska, recently revived its “marine debris removal initiative,” an effort to clean up the accumulation of marine debris along B.C.’s remote coastline. In 2024 alone, approximately 32.5 tonnes of debris was collected. The haul included fishing gear, nets, rope, polystyrene floats, plastic bottles and more. Coastal care is now integrated into Maple Leaf expeditions and guests on the tours join in the beach clean-ups. 

Tourism is big business 

Although the travel industry has seen a decline in business of late, prior to the pandemic, tourism was one of the world’s largest sectors, accounting for nearly 10.3% of all jobs (333 million) and 10.3% of global gross domestic product (US$9.6 trillion) as reported by the World Travel & Tourism Council. 

Conventional tourism is based on an economic model of increasing visitor numbers, which becomes self-defeating when the size of the crowd exceeds the coping capacity of the infrastructure and community. With its emphasis on reversing the environmental and socio-economic toll of visitors, regenerative tourism has a lot of appeal for locals.  

Not everyone is convinced, however. Writing for Bloomberg News, Amanda Little flagged the industry’s heavy reliance on carbon-intensive air travel and concluded that the sector has a very long road to “transition from being less-bad to becoming that essential meaning of regenerative, which is to ‘bring forth again.’” 

As a newcomer to the travel business, regenerative tourism is especially susceptible to greenwashing. Third-party certification helps mitigate against misleading marketing, although the labels range from rigorous to not so much. The respected U.S.-based non-profit Global Sustainable Tourism Council, however, has established global standards for sustainable travel and tourism, which are the result of a worldwide effort to develop a common language about sustainability in tourism. 

Anupaya received certification from GreenStep, a sustainable travel consultancy that offers certification services. The process was rigorous, MacLaggan says. It took six months to achieve silver certification (the second-highest level), and GreenStep audits certified businesses every two years. Adhering to those standards is no joke, she says: “It’s really challenging.” But, she adds, “When we saw this place, we knew instantly we would do anything to be able to steward this land.” 

Victoria Foote is a writer and editor who specializes in clean energy and climate.

The post A new trend in travel puts tourists to work for nature restoration   appeared first on Corporate Knights.

In January, Mark Carney told the crowd at the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting that the middle powers, like Canada, have the capacity to build a new world order and that allies will need to diversify to hedge against uncertainty. For Canada, the government is partly betting on a lower-carbon economy to meet this middle-power moment. The federal government’s climate competitiveness strategy aims to leverage clean technology and the nation’s abundant natural resources to boost Canada’s economy and position itself as a climate leader.

Though there are federal actions that have undercut this ambition, such as continued oil and gas subsidies, and evidence that curbing emissions in Canada has stalled, the economic case for climate action in Canada is strong. Some 66% of investments in Canadian oil and gas infrastructure are at risk of becoming stranded, according to a 2025 report by the International Institute for Sustainable Development. Canadian pension giant La Caisse saw investments in renewable energy tripled between 2017 and 2025, from $9 billion to $27.4 billion. Jobs within the environmental and clean technologies sector have grown faster compared to the broader economy for three years straight, according to a 2026 Statistics Canada study.

It’s against this backdrop that Toronto Climate Week (TOCW) 2026 will bring together innovators, business leaders, policymakers, researchers, artists and community members from all over the world. The second annual week-long event, from June 1 to 7, aims to showcase local and Canadian innovations while connecting to global opportunities, all while tapping into the discourse around the future of the global sustainable economy.

“I think Canada has a major opportunity right now to shape the global conversation around the clean-energy transition, and how the benefits of that transition to green energy can be an economic benefit for Canada,” says Kate Johnson, regional director for North America at C40 Cities, a global network of mayors from major cities working on climate action.

Cities lead on climate

Johnson, who is attending the Toronto event, has seen several climate action weeks pop up around the world. In some ways, that’s no surprise: “[Cities are] really the first responders,” she says, when it comes to climate change impacts, which intersect with rising energy bills and housing costs. Cities want to respond holistically to these overlapping crises, but it’s challenging, she says. Cities in the C40 network share resources and clout, and they’re making the case that it’s smart to use climate-smart solutions to address broader concerns.

Toronto Climate Week is “a really great opportunity just to get a pulse of what’s happening, not just in Toronto, but in Canada more broadly,” Johnson says. The event is expected to attract around 10,000 attendees to more than 200 scheduled events across the city. On the agenda are things like carbon solutions, the circular economy, cleantech and environmental justice.

Carbon focus

One of the flagship events, Carbon Solutions: Canada’s Competitive Advantage, will look at several carbon-removal and -management solutions in Canada and global markets. Carbon removal is forecast to be a US$1.2-trillion industry by 2050, according to a 2023 McKinsey report. With 20% of the world’s fresh water, 347 million hectares of boreal forest, 62.2 million hectares of farmland, more than 240,000 kilometres of coastline and an abundance of nature, Canada has ample opportunities to leverage its resources to help support climate action – and a lot to protect, too. Several companies have already started to look to Canada’s landscapes to sequester carbon.

Brady Paron, senior vice president of carbon market partnerships at Mast, a reforestation company working on restoring landscapes after wildfires, will be on a panel at the carbon-solutions flagship event. Mast takes trees that were killed in wildfires and buries them deep underground to prevent the wood from further decomposing and releasing more carbon into the atmosphere. To fund wildfire cleanup and landscape restoration expenses, Mast sells carbon credits to companies.

So far, there has been only a pilot project in Montana, but Canada is on Mast’s radar. “We see there’s a huge opportunity for biomass burial projects in Canada, given that we’ve got tons of forests in Canada,” Paron says, “and we’re unfortunately also seeing increasing wildfires here as well.” Paron is Canadian and based in Toronto but works for a U.S.-based company. He says this hybridity affords him a useful lens for TOCW: it’s not just about highlighting the incredible innovation in Canada, but also showcasing solutions to the entire world. “Canada can be a superpower for this moving forward.”

Sequestration strategy

Undo, a U.K.-registered company, has also focused on carbon sequestration projects in Canada. Working with farmers in Ontario, Undo offers enhanced rock weathering, a method that crushes abundant silicate rocks into a powder, through carbon credits sold to companies. The crushed rock both captures carbon from the atmosphere and can improve soil health, creating a win-win for the climate and farmers.

Peggy Sue Deaven, general manager for Canada at Undo, thinks that climate-solution companies like Undo need to showcase that they can make just as much business sense as the conventional big emitters. “We are a robust, competitive, for-profit, eat-your-heart-out [business], and we do good things.” Deaven, who will also be on a panel during the flagship TOCW carbon-solutions event, adds that climate solutions is an area where Canada can already own its leadership status in the world and that there are solutions that make economic sense.

With an existential threat like climate change, it’s important to connect with others, Deaven argues. “The soaring potential for folk to come together audaciously and to think what’s next, how are we pulse-checking with one another – that kind of community coming together is exceptional,” she says. “Toronto’s such a hub for innovation, so it does bring out the best in folk there.”

Corporate Knights is a media sponsor of Toronto Climate Week. This article was produced independently by the Corporate Knights editorial team, and Toronto Climate Week did not review or approve the content prior to publication.

The post Carbon solutions take centre stage at Toronto Climate Week appeared first on Corporate Knights.

The C40 is one fairly robust example of subnational climate diplomacy, but it’s not the only one. The U.S. Climate Alliance, a league of more than 20 blue states, partners informally with European Union institutions and member states. The conjoined California-Quebec cap-and-trade market, which has been operating for about 12 years, shows how regional governments on different sides of a national border can create carbon markets. Earlier this year, in fact, California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, went one step further and pushed his state’s climate diplomacy all the way across the Atlantic, inking a memorandum of understanding with the United Kingdom’s Labour government to support decarbonization efforts, promote resilience, exchange technical expertise and “engage in mutually beneficial economic and innovation activities through increased research and academic cooperation.”

News of California’s deal with Westminster attracted, predictably, the ire of President Donald Trump, who first belittled Newsom and then stated that it is “inappropriate” for the United Kingdom to be dealing with a climate-minded governor. After all, the U.S. government’s national policy on climate change and the energy transition tacks in precisely the opposition direction, as evidenced by billions in stalled or cancelled clean-energy subsidies (although some offshore wind received reprieves in the courts), the declawing of the Environmental Protection Agency and the administration’s seemingly inexhaustible support for coal.

This latest clash between Trump and Newsom – hardly the first and unlikely the last – raises a tricky question: if international affairs is the natural purview of national governments, should subnational entities – states, regions, even cities – have the latitude to go their own way, especially when the climate stakes are so stark?

During Trump’s first term, the White House went to court to kill the California-Quebec cap-and-trade market, citing a provision in the U.S. Constitution that grants Washington the exclusive right to conduct international diplomacy unless Congress provides an exemption. But the Trump administration’s resulting lawsuit didn’t survive regime change, and the Biden administration dropped the case in 2021. A year later, Biden signed a law formalizing the role of subnational diplomacy, and even set up a dedicated division within the State Department, complete with its very own “special representative for city and state diplomacy.” That gesture, unsurprisingly, did not survive into Trump’s second term.

The case for a transatlantic framework

So now what? “In the absence of federal-level commitment and in the presence of federal contestation of climate change and energy security policy,” says Jakob Wiedekind, a professor of political science and international relations at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, “it is clear that we are looking for other channels and avenues to cooperate across the Atlantic . . . This is not the first time we had to do that [because] American positions and climate change policy have fluctuated.”

In a recent article in the Georgetown Journal of International Affairs, Wiedekind laid out the case for creating what he dubs a “Transatlantic Subnational Resilience Framework” that could help sustain international dialogue on climate change and renewable energy in a period when Washington is very much not in the mood to engage, especially with the European Union.

The EU, of course, has plenty of its own experience with subnational diplomacy and what Wiedekind calls “multi-level governance.” For example, he cites the diverse ways in which EU member states sought to wean themselves off Russian natural gas after the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, with a heavy emphasis on renewables. That exercise, dubbed REPowerEU, originated with directives from the European Commission but “allowed member states specifically and regional actors to share expertise on how that would be done,” he says, adding there could be other such top-down/bottom-up efforts to confront issues such as the wildfires and flooding that have swept through much of Western Europe and the United States in recent years.

Wiedekind argues that a transatlantic framework for subnational climate diplomacy could work in a similarly flexible and decentralized way, through regular meetings, leveraging commercialized clean technologies, and shared commitments to achieve resilience goals. Wiedekind, however, stresses that any such group should not become part of the annual conference of the parties (COP) that have joined the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, which, he says, has become too politicized.

Indeed, the whole point of the exercise Wiedekind envisions is to depoliticize those international conversations as much as possible so they don’t become a target. He also contends that shifting the focus to climate-adjacent topics like wildfires, flooding and profitable clean-energy ventures could evolve into a strategy for engaging state-level Republican lawmakers who might otherwise steer clear of climate policy per se.

Such ideas reveal both the desperation and opportunities of a moment when the world’s most powerful government has become consumed by climate denial. No matter how hard it tries, the Trump administration can project its philosophy only so far. Other nations and other jurisdictions are resisting. The resulting conversations around collaboration and work-arounds offer evidence, however slight, that climate diplomacy will persist until this storm passes.

John Lorinc is a Toronto journalist who writes about cities, climate and business.

The post U.S. states and cities are building a parallel system for climate diplomacy appeared first on Corporate Knights.

Tom Chi doesn’t have much patience for that whole routine. In a wide-ranging conversation about his new book, Climate Capital: Investing in the Tools for a Regenerative Future (Wiley, 2026), the Google X co-founder and innovator offered a metaphor that’s both blunt and clarifying: “Trying to solve the climate problem by first persuading people who don’t accept the basic physics is like trying to build an aircraft with people who don’t believe flight is possible. You don’t get anywhere.”

This isn’t “stop persuading.” It’s “stop postponing.” Secure the minimum agreement needed to act, then let real-world progress do the persuading.

Chi has honed this capacity across a range of disciplines, from astrophysical researcher at the Harvard-Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory at the age of 15, to Fortune 500 company consultant. He’s played a pivotal role in the development of tools that are synonymous with the modern age, including Microsoft Outlook and Yahoo Search. At Google X, he shaped Google Glass and its self-driving cars. As a founding partner of At One Ventures, he is driven to direct seed funding to disruptive tech innovations that help industries become a net positive to nature.

Chi says we need to change how money, rules and decisions work – and we need to move quickly. To achieve that, he offers a diagnostic: watch the vocabulary. “When you’re actually advancing on a problem, the language around the problem keeps advancing.”

RELATED STORIES

How to scale up the green economy

What does climate change progress look like?

The race for low-carbon energy is turning into a green cold war 

In fields that are genuinely learning, nouns evolve. Conversations become more precise. Arguments get technical. Questions shift from whether something is possible to how it’s built, financed, regulated and deployed. You can feel the difference between a debate that is stuck performing morality and a discipline that is moving toward execution.

Climate hasn’t had enough of that linguistic evolution. In fact, it has often moved in the opposite direction – toward softer terms and convenient vagueness. We’ve normalized “climate change,” a phrase that makes a crisis sound like a gradual shift you can adapt to over time. But what we’re living through is a loss of predictability: more extremes, more swings, more disruption. That’s why “climate destabilization” is the more accurate description, according to Chi.

Chi argues that the real story isn’t just warming; it’s volatility, or the breakdown of predictability that underpins everything from infrastructure engineering to actuarial models. As he puts it, “The killing edge of climate risk is volatility, not averages. We should have been tracking variance and standard deviation.”

Averages don’t overwhelm storm sewers; extremes do. Averages don’t shift growing seasons, then whiplash them back; variance does. And in Canada, where climate impacts are now colliding with household budgets, volatility is increasingly visible on one front in particular: insurance.

When catastrophic losses rise and become harder to price, the cost doesn’t stay in the balance sheets of insurers or reinsurers. It moves into premiums, deductibles, exclusions – and then into politics. Affordability becomes the headline, and the climate signal gets translated into the language of family finances: can I insure my home, and if I can, what am I giving up to do it? For Chi, “destabilization” captures how climate risk migrates across systems – from weather into underwriting, from underwriting into housing costs, from housing costs into inequality.

Climate Capital is about how the economy is designed – and how capital can be used to redesign it, so we stop financing damage and start financing durability. Chi treats economics as a design discipline, not a natural law. Which is another way of saying: the world we have is not inevitable; it’s governed.

And governance, in his telling, is not only spreadsheets and oversight. It’s culture. It’s relationships. It’s the invisible infrastructure of decision-making inside institutions that claim they want change while rewarding stasis. Chi’s most practical move is to argue that the “soft stuff” is not soft at all: “The financial performance stuff is table stakes. The other half of board management is emotional labour – and the quality of relationships is what determines outcomes.”

Transitions fail not only because technologies don’t exist, but because institutions can’t hold the trade-offs. They fracture under conflict, treat legitimacy as branding and assume that trust is a “nice-to-have” rather than a form of capital that compounds, or collapses.

This is where Chi’s “4Cs” rubric – critical thinking, creativity, compassion, community – becomes less a personal development list and more an institutional capability set. Critical thinking to interrogate the assumptions embedded in risk models. Creativity to fund deployment pathways, not just prototypes. Compassion and community to maintain the relational capacity required to make hard decisions repeatedly, at speed, without losing the room. This last requirement becomes non-negotiable in a destabilized climate, he argues.

The climate conversation doesn’t need another round of rhetorical victories, Chi says. It needs different builder behaviour: procurement that values resilience, not only unit cost; financing structures that bridge first-of-a-kind projects across the valley of death; investment committees that treat adaptation as investable infrastructure, not an afterthought; and insurers working with governments and builders so “build back better” stops being a slogan and becomes a default.

The test of whether we’re moving forward won’t be whether we publish another eloquent climate statement. It will be whether we can start naming things as they are and following up with tangible actions.

The following excerpts have been edited and condensed.

Chi on the urgency of the era

“There is a type of urgency to technology, but it’s really more a competitive urgency where you try to be the first to do an innovation. You’re going to be the first to go and get a new feature out there, to be more attractive to customers, all that sort of thing. There is no more foundational timeline to it other than the urgency of capitalism: trying to be an innovator in a competitive field.”

“But when I saw the [coral] reef die and I talked with a bunch of coral scientists about it, a very specific timeline started to come into view. We mostly talk about them as planetary tipping points, and I actually think that’s a little bit too abstract. There’s a lot of things that are happening which are one-way doorways we will not be able to go back through. If a lot of the Amazon rainforest fully succeeds in becoming more savanna-like, then that’s not something that’s easily reversible.”

“There’s a point where things either become undoable time-wise because the thing has become extinct or the thing has disrepaired so extensively where it becomes economically unviable for us to go sustain it in the better state. [Seeing] that recontextualized a lot of things for me.”

Chi on climate vocabulary 

“I wanted to use a term that would capture what I was seeing in the data, all those disruptions. And the best word that I could come up with was ‘destabilization,’ because whether it’s warmer or cooler, you will be destabilized compared to your historical baseline. Whether it’s wetter or drier, you will be destabilized. Whether you’re now having thousand-year storm events every five years – which is kind of the zone that we’re getting into right now – or whether for you it’s a 100-year storm every three years, that is all still destabilized. And I wanted the term that would be accurate for all the spots on Earth and reflective of the numbers. Because I’m a scientist first, right? I want to make sure that we get the numbers right. And then I try to make the communication true to what the actual truth is, as opposed to what will elicit the least amount of action and emotional sentiment.”

Chi on climate change deniers

“The entire dialogue has been hijacked by the climate deniers. We’ve spent so much time trying to go and reason with people that have no interest in reason. Trying to go and solve climate change after convincing climate deniers is like trying to go build an aircraft with people who don’t believe in flight. You just don’t get anywhere.”

Chi on the ‘average’ trap 

“The easiest way for the scientific community to coordinate was to move toward averages. It’s relatively easy to agree on averages: You did a study. I did a study. We did a study. Let’s add all the data points together. We can find the centre of gravity here. We can find the averages.”

“Now the problem is that it’s the volatility that is the killing edge of climate, not the averages. What a half-a-degree increase might mean in a particular spot on Earth might mean six degrees hotter in the summer, five degrees colder. We should have been looking at things like standard deviation, variance, other sorts of volatility metrics. That would have given us a way more realistic sense of how soon it would be before we would have, for example, disruptive scales of wildfire. Because it was way sooner than most people thought when they were looking at the averages.”

Shilpa Tiwari is the founder of No Women No Spice and Isenzo Group.

The post Tech innovator Tom Chi on how clean capital can catch up appeared first on Corporate Knights.

I mean, that’s the received wisdom of the moment. The media are full of commentators (many of whom, like this guy, barely believe that climate change is real) crowing about the so-called collapse of net-zero.

Over the past year it has sometimes felt as though the issue has been banished from polite company, relegated to the nosebleeds in the national political arena.

But here’s the thing: climate change hasn’t disappeared from the consciousness of Canadians. It’s simply been displaced, at the moment, by other issues. As pollster David Coletto has found, “At the top of Canadians’ worry list sit the rising cost of living (66%), the economy (39%) and healthcare (35%). The public mood is focused intensely on the pressures of the everyday.”

There’s lots of evidence that Canadians still feel strongly about climate change, despite this recent reshuffling of their priorities. Nearly two-thirds of Canadians think of it as a “major crisis,” and clear supermajorities think governments and companies should be doing more to address it.

So, what should we make of all this?

2026 marks 30 years that I’ve been a working advocate for environmental progress. Through multiple great organizations, countless campaigns and every kind of sustainability issue you can imagine, here’s one of my most important lessons learned – a good thing to remember this Earth Day:

Though it has its ups and downs, concern about climate change will always come roaring back as a top public concern.

There are at least two reasons for this that are often lost on commentators who are too focused on the temporary swings in issue polling.

The first is that, as I’ve said many times in this space, climate change progress is now driven by technological and economic trends that are unstoppable. These trends have been accelerating for years. But they have now been turbocharged by the Iran war, which is constraining global oil and gas supply and cranking up the price of gasoline and natural gas. As a result, consumers are rushing to buy electric options that are increasingly affordable and not subject to these wild price swings: from electric vehicles to solar panels to induction stoves, in places as diverse as Lagos, San Francisco and New Delhi.

The second reason is that – perhaps unique among public policy issues – climate change has a built-in ratcheting effect. Even if we stopped all production of carbon dioxide tomorrow, more severe wildfires and flooding and drought are going to keep getting worse around the world. The negative impacts of climate change are increasingly visible and dramatic and measurable.

It’s quite often the case that policy files get bumped back up the priority list only because of things going wrong. One recent example that people may remember is the safety of long-term care homes. Before the pandemic, provincial governments scarcely gave it a thought, and regulatory oversight and public scrutiny were almost non-existent. When the death toll among the elderly in long-term care homes tragically took off during the pandemic, public outrage forced those governments to move quickly to address the issue.

The grim reality is that climate change is going to serve up endless, worsening, disasters over the next few decades to fire up the public imagination, and force a political response.

The issue may wax and wane in prominence, but it will never disappear for long.

RELATED STORIES

Canada needs fast action on its new climate competitiveness strategy

For Canadians, decarbonization is a patriotic act

What does climate change progress look like?

Let’s get even more specific as to timing: because so much of the climate change malaise currently afflicting the world is related to the bone-headed moves of the Trump administration (my most recent favourite being the payment of US$1 billion to a French energy company to refrain from building offshore wind farms on leases it had purchased), I’m going to predict that climate change starts re-entering the public discourse on November 4, the day after the Democrats pick up considerable seats in the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate, which all public polling says they are on track to do.

Democrats have internalized an urgency to solve climate change. Yes, this may vary from candidate to candidate and from place to place, but whether it’s centrist Virginia Governor Abigail Spanberger’s commitment to accelerating clean-energy deployment or progressive New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s tying together of heat pumps and affordability, a basic commitment to reducing greenhouse gas emissions is a permanent part of the Democratic Party’s offering.

Why is this the case? Because it’s a big deal for a significant majority of their voting base. More than 85% of registered Democrats think that developing clean energy should be a high or very high priority for government. But beyond the brass tacks of electoral incentives, there is the hard-headed dollars-and-cents argument that the United States cannot let China dominate this new industrial revolution powered by clean electricity and electrical machines like EVs and heat pumps.

History will record Donald Trump’s quixotic crusade against windmills and the rest of the clean-energy transition as an irrational, short-lived and economically disastrous footnote.

So this Earth Day, take heart: the pendulum of climate change concern is about to swing again. We’re almost through this difficult period. This time next year it’s going to be a whole new ball game. And we’re going to be on the offence again.

Rick Smith is president of the Canadian Climate Institute, the co-author of two bestselling books on the effects of pollution on human health, and the executive producer of Plastic People, a 2024 documentary chronicling the damage done by microplastics in the human body.

The post Think concern for climate change is passé? Think again. appeared first on Corporate Knights.

But what would Ottawa actually do differently? Details were scarce, and traditional business think tanks, dominated by global companies, tended to stay silent.

But one voice made itself heard. Just days after the release of Trump’s National Security Strategy, the Council of Canadian Innovators (CCI) fired back with a layered plan for building a domestic technology industry that could free the country from foreign tech platforms and build Canadian prosperity.

Founded in 2015 by two energetic tech leaders – former BlackBerry co-CEO Jim Balsillie and venture capitalist John Ruffolo, then CEO of OMERS Ventures – the CCI provides a voice for more than 150 independent tech companies. Rather than ceding control of Canada’s digital infrastructure to foreign multinationals, CCI aims to build a community of more ambitious homegrown tech firms that put Canada first.

CCI’s letter urged the government to focus on new export markets and embedding value-added innovation into traditional exports such as resources, energy and food. Ottawa should convene industry advisory groups to help guide these new trade negotiations, the letter argued, and promote made-in-Canada tech platforms.

“Canada needs to decide whether we will be strategic participants or a vassal state to global tech giants,” CCI CEO Patrick Searle said in a statement. The new U.S. security strategy, he said, proves that in today’s markets, intellectual property, AI and quantum computing, and new defence technologies aren’t just important business breakthroughs, but “national security assets.”

With the United States adopting a winner-take-all manifesto, Searle says, “Canada needs to respond with urgency, clarity, and a domestic strategy built around sovereign capability.”

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

The post Canada’s innovators have a plan for a more sovereign economy appeared first on Corporate Knights.

The party’s momentum has been building since the United Kingdom’s July 2024 general election, when voters elected four Green Party members of Parliament out of a total of 650, quadrupling the party’s number of representatives in the House of Commons while removing a handful of seats from the Labour and Conservative parties. 

Nearly two years later, the Greens are now averaging around 13.5% support nationally, with a notable gain in recent months, according to an aggregated Guardian tracker. In February, Green Party candidate and plumber Hannah Spencer won a by-election in Manchester’s Gorton and Denton constituency, an area that had been previously held by Labour for the past 90 years, bringing the party’s total number of MPs to five. 

What’s powering the surge? Experts say increasing political fragmentation is a key factor, with more voters looking for alternatives to Labour and the Conservatives, which have held the most seats in recent elections. Growing disillusionment with the governing Labour Party is another factor. Britain’s centre-left party is tanking with voters, many of whom feel it has failed to address the cost-of-living crisis or deliver on its promises. According to YouGov’s polling, Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s personal favourability sat at 18% in January 2026. 

There’s a big space to the left of the Labour Party that’s been there for a few years. Polanski is tapping into that opportunity.

— Mitya Pearson, University of Warwick

While Starmer’s support stagnates, the Green Party’s Polanski, who is 43, is on an upward trajectory. He was elected party leader in fall 2025, beating two of the party’s MPs with a left-wing eco-populist platform and a direct communication style. Polanski has said the party needs to “connect with that anger and turn it to hope, turn it to possible solutions.” And his message and style have been resonating with an increasing number of voters who feel abandoned by the Labour Party. Since fall 2025, Green Party membership has almost tripled, from 68,500 to more than 200,000.  

“I finally feel seen by a politician and someone who is willing to not only defend but make my family’s lives better,” says Tinashe Warikandwa, a London resident who describes herself as a member of the queer community and the daughter of an immigrant and a disabled mother. She is one of the thousands of Brits who recently became Green Party members. “My great interest in Zack is his push to tax the rich,” Warikandwa says. “There is such a discomfort in the U.K., with the cost of everything and not much funding going into our communities. I like his angle of saying there’s more of us than the 1%, so he’s trying to bring us all together. He’s young and fresh and unfiltered.” 

Polanski’s message connects the dots between cost-of-living pressures, economic inequality and the climate crisis. He has also taken on issues that Labour and other parties have been reluctant to engage with, including the rights of Palestinian people to self-determination and trans rights.  

“There’s a big space to the left of the Labour Party that’s been there for a few years. Polanski is tapping into that opportunity,” says Mitya Pearson, assistant professor in the Politics of Climate Change MA program at the University of Warwick. “Although [the Greens] have always really emphasized the environment and climate change, they’ve been keen to point out that they’re not a single-issue party. So while climate change is part of [their platform], it’s not absolutely front and centre.”  

The rise of the Green Party and forward push on climate policies in the United Kingdom stands in contrast to what’s happening in Germany, Austria and other European countries, where far-right parties have been trying to dismantle support for climate policies by blaming them for cost-of-living challenges. Environmentalists and think tanks are raising alarm bells about what they’re calling a “greenlash” against the European Green Deal and other climate policies. 

Pearson believes that European voters are still supportive of progressive climate policies but that support for these issues has been superseded by affordability concerns. In both Europe and the United Kingdom, voters are sending the message that affordability and the climate are interconnected and must be addressed as such.   

Will Polanski and the Green Party be able to continue to build support in the United Kingdom by connecting those dots? Calls are growing for Starmer to resign, and Pearson says some expect the Labour Party to begin leaning more to the left to rebuild its base. If that happens, there may be more competition for the space the Greens have been moving into. Which could mean more debate about progressive issues, and more choice for voters. 

The post The U.K. Green Party’s having a moment  appeared first on Corporate Knights.

She was new to the issues herself, she said. But the long-time social worker kept at her new job doing outreach for Community Action Network, a local non-profit dedicated to serving under-resourced communities. She slowly started getting people in her neighbourhood to take part first in home energy assessments, then a city program to swap out appliances, make structural fixes and more.

“In the beginning it was kind of hard – a lot of people were reluctant. If someone is knocking on your door and telling you they can fix up your home for free, most people don’t believe that,” Steward says. But, she adds, “Once one person tried it out, they’d tell their neighbours, and others would jump on board.”

Now the neighbourhood, Bryant, is set to pilot a first-in-the-country program that officials hope will speed the city’s transition to renewables – and offer a new model for how local governments can control their energy future.

A tandem system

The idea is technical but has sparked enthusiasm across Bryant and Ann Arbor: a new city-created Sustainable Energy Utility, known colloquially as the SEU. Rather than replacing the privately owned utility that serves Ann Arbor, the plan is for this city agency to run in tandem, offering a supplemental service that residents can opt into.

If they do, they’ll stay connected to the regular grid but will be outfitted with solar panels, battery backup systems or other infrastructure, drawing on that power for their home use and opening up the prospect of selling any excess. The city, meanwhile, would pay for the installation and maintenance of these systems, which Ann Arbor would continue to own – a vision of energy generation and storage distributed across the city.

The plan begins in the coming months in Bryant, a 1970s-era community with about 260 homes, many of which are officially considered “energy burdened.” A quarter of residents spend more than a third of their incomes on utilities, in a neighbourhood that is one of Ann Arbor’s only areas of unsubsidized affordable housing, according to Derrick Miller, Community Action Network’s executive director.

The SEU is a major step in a years-long process to address Bryant’s energy affordability and sustainability concerns – and then expand the approach across the city.

“When we started having a conversation about how to decarbonize the neighbourhood about four years ago, it felt outlandish. Now, it doesn’t feel like anyone can stop us,” Miller says.

A welcome solution

The appeal of the SEU became clear in November 2024, when a ballot measure on the proposal was approved by nearly 80% of Ann Arbor voters. A little over a year later, city officials are ready to implement the vision, SEU executive director Shoshannah Lenski says.

In late February, the city announced that it was accepting expressions of interest from residents and businesses to take part, accompanied by a flurry of community meetings, animated videos and ads in local theatre playbills.

Customers who opt in will get two utility bills – one for the power supplied by these new city-owned clean-energy systems and one for any power they’re still drawing from the regular grid – which Lenski and her colleagues say will add up to less than they currently pay.

“Just like customers don’t own a power plant, the city owns and finances the system upfront, and they pay for that electricity through a monthly bill,” Lenski says. She notes that the model could prove particularly helpful for renters, who are often left out of green energy incentives.  Signing up large multifamily buildings will be important to quickly expand the SEU’s size, she says.

In addition to installing clean-energy systems at participants’ homes, the SEU could build its own microgrids, something that would set it apart from other municipal clean-energy programs. For instance, the agency could install solar panels on a school to supply power when students and teachers are in the building, and that power could go to other SEU customers when classes are out.

Backers say the strategy allows Ann Arbor to build out its green energy system with lower financial risk – and lower potential for political or industry pushback.

“When coupled with DTE’s planned investments in clean energy, these voluntary, fee-based programs help accelerate economy-wide decarbonization while maintaining reliability and affordability,” Ryan Lowry, a spokesperson for DTE Energy, which currently supplies energy to the city, says in an email.

It might seem surprising that DTE, Michigan’s largest electric utility, is supportive of the SEU. But industry experts note that many investor-owned utilities are struggling under the unprecedented new demands for power. Having a local government try to help manage power needs could be seen as an asset, they suggest – though DTE will have no formal role in the SEU.

So far, more than 1,500 people across Ann Arbor have indicated that they want to sign up. The SEU plans to serve around 100 to 150 customers in Bryant this year, expand out to reach 1,000 next year, and then grow by several thousand annually after that.

Embracing ambition

The approach answers a question prompted when Ann Arbor adopted an ambitious climate plan in 2020.

That framework included an electrical grid powered completely by renewable energy within a decade, but a city analysis in 2023 warned it was likely to miss that goal by more than 40%. To reach it, the city would need to push DTE to accelerate its renewable-energy buildout, or lean on state officials to do so – or detach from DTE entirely and create a separate city-owned utility, an idea that does have some support in Ann Arbor.

But from the city’s perspective, these options seemed too risky or uncertain, Lenski says – until officials realized that the Michigan constitution allows municipalities to create and run their own utility, even if there’s another present. “That’s where the idea of the SEU was born,” she says.

When University of Michigan researchers compared the four options, they found that the SEU model had the greatest potential to lower energy prices and emissions, boost reliability and help low-income communities.

RELATED STORIES

2024 will be the hottest on record. Here’s how cities are becoming more climate resilient

Municipalities are waking up to climate risk, and that’s a good thing

What does climate change progress look like?

“Overall, it came down to having some benefits of local control without some of the costs,” says Mike Shriberg, a professor who led the research, noting a similar model should be possible in every state.

Still, some worry the strategy does not go far enough. Advocates who want the city to break with DTE and replace its services with a utility fully owned by Ann Arbor are seeking a November ballot measure to set that process in motion. (Organizers are currently collecting signatures.)

Brian Geiringer, executive director of the advocacy group Ann Arbor for Public Power, says the SEU plan still leaves too much responsibility for the city’s energy transition with DTE. But if voters do approve creating a fully public utility, he says, it would not mean an end to the SEU: the two approaches could work together, with the SEU focused on generation within Ann Arbor, and a publicly owned utility able to make its own decisions on purchasing power.

“If you draw a circle around Ann Arbor, the SEU is doing stuff inside the circle,” Geiringer says. “And we’re interested in having the city control what comes in from outside of the circle.”

Cities take control

Like Ann Arbor, hundreds of cities are working to implement climate goals – and running into similar gaps between ambition and practicality, especially when it comes to control over energy sources.

“Cities have set these goals, and the utilities aren’t obligated to follow those,” says Matthew Popkin, manager for U.S. cities and communities at RMI, an energy think tank. “So Ann Arbor’s SEU is an example of cities taking more control of their future without dismantling or acquiring existing utility systems,” he says. “That’s a really interesting model.”

Other models also exist. In Washington, D.C., for instance, a program called the D.C. Sustainable Energy Utility has been operating for 15 years, overseeing the city’s efforts to help residents use less energy. The initiative is far narrower than the Ann Arbor vision, functioning not as a utility but rather as an organization contracted by the city to boost energy efficiency and increase access to clean energy through subsidies and rebates.

The program is a central part of the city’s goals to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions, managing director Benjamin Burdick says, and has helped cut some 10 million metric tons of emissions while saving residents more than US$2 billion from reduced energy use. Nationally, “the conversation that we’re hearing is around how do you continue to talk about climate with affordability,” he says. “Programs like the D.C. SEU are going to continue to be the way that we double down.”

The work in Ann Arbor is now receiving its own attention across the country. “What caught my eye about Ann Arbor’s efforts were the references to citizen involvement and co-investment in their own grid,” says Jim Gilbert, a retired medical product designer in Boulder, Colorado, who is now helping the city assess the Ann Arbor model.

Boulder has dealt with recent power outages due to worsening climate impacts and aging infrastructure, and Gilbert says an SEU could offer a way forward.

Back in Ann Arbor, as the city prepares to launch the initial pilot of its SEU, the plan is to reach half of the Bryant neighbourhood by the end of the year – and local residents are “all in,” says Krystal Steward.

Older members of the community are particularly excited, Steward says, noting that many are on fixed incomes and will particularly benefit from lower energy bills. “It’s hard for me to keep up,” she says. “Now it’s not me reaching out to residents to sign up – they’re blowing up my phone.”

Carey L. Biron reports on sustainable cities, inclusive development and local solutions. He is based in Washington, D.C. 

This article originally appeared in Grist. It has been edited to conform with Corporate Knights style. Grist is a non-profit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at grist.org.

The post A Michigan city is building its own parallel grid for clean energy appeared first on Corporate Knights.

Of course we need to achieve net-zero by 2050: it’s a chemical necessity for the atmosphere. But this is hardly a goal that your average person can see and touch and wrap their arms around.

Compounding the difficulty is that 2050 is a quarter century away. What do the signposts of success look like between now and then? How do we make sure we’re on track? Where do we course-correct if we’re not?

One way that countries have tried to define progress is by measuring the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions.

The landmark Paris Agreement, signed a decade ago, aims to hold the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels. Countries determine themselves what contributions they should make to achieve the aims of the agreement. These plans, called nationally determined contributions (NDCs), are required to be “ambitious efforts” toward “achieving the purpose of this Agreement” and to “represent a progression over time.” The contributions are to be set every five years and registered with the United Nations.

Similar to many other nations, Canada has enshrined its Paris Agreement commitments in a national law, the Canada Net-Zero Emissions Accountability Act, adopted by Parliament in 2021. Under this act, the federal government has rolled out its Emissions Reduction Plan that it regularly updates.

For Canadians, decarbonization is a patriotic act

Unsurprisingly, given that the global community has consciously structured the climate change issue around these yearly measurements of emissions reduction, that’s the primary lens through which the public now views the discussion. A significant proportion of climate change media headlines relate to emissions targets being met, or not met.

Don’t get me wrong: I think this Paris Agreement approach has been useful. Like Canada, most countries in the world have methodically catalogued every scrap of carbon emissions and created policy architectures to start knocking them back. That’s led to a substantial reduction in projected future warming – close to one full degree Celsius by century’s end.

But a decade on from the Paris Agreement, I don’t think that communicating to the public the success or failure of climate progress in terms of megatonnes of carbon reduced – putting this in the metaphorical window every chance we get – is the best we can do.

For one thing, and as I’ve already observed above, it’s not really comprehensible or tangible for most people.

For another, there are better, more compelling stories of success or failure to tell. Let’s take electric vehicles as one example. When the Paris Agreement was signed, electric vehicles were less than 1% of new vehicle sales around the world. Today, they are more than 25% and rising fast. The boom in electric vehicles is actually resulting in less demand for oil and less greenhouse gas emissions. The International Energy Agency, for example, pegged the total number of barrels of oil displaced by EV adoption at more than 1.3 million barrels per day in 2024. The agency expects that number to rise to more than five million barrels per day by 2030.

Most compelling of all, EVs are just better machines than gasoline-powered cars. Anyone who drives one loves them and saves money in the long term (especially when the price of oil skyrockets because of the type of international conflicts we’re seeing at the moment).

Heat pumps are another example. In 2015, globally, heat pumps were generally a marginal technology. Now: heat pumps outsell gas furnaces in the United States and in many markets. And because they are more efficient than natural gas furnaces, and run by electricity, they are starting to measurably reduce carbon emissions.

A fork in the road for the Canadian climate change discussion

The rate of uptake of electric vehicles and heat pumps is an extremely important measure of climate change progress. As opposed to emission reductions, they are visible, tangible things.

So as a way of refocusing the climate change discussion in a positive direction, the Canadian Climate Institute is going to start tracking these indicators of progress such as EV and heat pump sales data in the months ahead.

This is also a way of holding governments to account. The recent announcement by Prime Minister Mark Carney that the federal government is aiming for 75% of new cars sold by 2035 to be EVs is a clear commitment. And it’s an opportunity to ensure that the package of policies he has released will get us to that goal.

As I’ve said before in this space, the climate change discussion is a marathon, not a sprint. It has evolved over decades and will continue to do so. The way we talk about the issue in order to ensure that it gets the attention it needs in a volatile world requires constant reinvention to ensure that we’re connecting with our audiences.

Rick Smith is president of the Canadian Climate Institute, the co-author of two bestselling books on the effects of pollution on human health, and the executive producer of Plastic People, a 2024 documentary chronicling the damage done by microplastics in the human body.

The post What does climate change progress look like? appeared first on Corporate Knights.