However, numbers are the biggest problem with this book, starting with the first sentence: “There are two numbers you need to know about climate change. The first is 51 billion. The other is zero.” Fifty-one billion was the number of tonnes of CO2 from human activity added to the atmosphere in 2019; zero emissions are what Gates says we have to aim for to avoid the worst effects of climate change. But Gates says we still need concrete, fertilizer and natural-gas power plants (others think there are solutions for all three of these, but that’s another story), so he calls for “near net-zero,” where carbon dioxide is removed from the atmosphere with carbon-capture devices, by reducing carbon in production processes, or through some form of offsetting.

None of these exist at scale at this time, but hey, don’t worry, Bill is on it: “I’m also a technophile. Show me a problem, and I’ll look for technology to fix it.” He has put a bit of his money where his mouth is, investing more than a billion dollars in everything from low-carbon cement and steel to faux meat, and several-hundred-million dollars in next-generation nukes.

The second problematic pair of numbers in Gates’s book are 2030 and 2050. Both are targets set in the Paris Agreement; to keep the rise in global average temperature below 1.5°C at the end of the century, we have to reduce emissions by about 50% by 2030 and to about zero by 2050. Gates does not believe that 2030 is realistic and thinks aiming for it might even be counterproductive. “Why? Because the things we’d do to get small reductions by 2030 are radically different from the things we’d do to get to zero by 2050. They’re really two different pathways, with different measures of success, and we have to choose between them.”

The 2030 pathway would mean starting now with the technology we have, which might take us 80% of the way. But Gates says we should be thinking big and using the time to plan for “the big technological changes that would ensure long-term success.” There is some logic to his worry about “lock-in” with investments in problematic “bridge fuels” like natural gas, when his strategy is to go zero-carbon with renewables and nuclear power, electrifying everything, and then using carbon capture to pick the remaining CO2 out of the air and then store it somehow.

The problem with these strategies is time, given another big number: 570 billion tonnes. That’s the estimate by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change back in 2018 of the total quantity of CO2 that can be added to the atmosphere if we are going to have a good chance of staying under 1.5° warming. Divide that by Bill Gates’s 51 billion tonnes and we run out of headroom before 2030, and it’s why every single molecule of CO2 emitted now matters; if we keep pushing off making changes, then his new technology is going to have to do an awful lot of CO2 sucking.

The second, bigger problem with a 2050 target is what futurist Alex Steffen calls “predatory delay.” It lets Toronto Mayor John Tory pour a billion dollars of concrete into the Gardiner Expressway or Ontario Premier Doug Ford push a highway through the greenbelt because “don’t worry, we will have electric cars.” It lets Jason Kenney and Justin Trudeau keep boiling rocks in Alberta because “don’t worry, we will have a hydrogen economy.” It lets Gates keep flying his private jet because he will be able to buy sustainable fuel. It lets us wait for some deus ex machina to drop out of the sky and save us, instead of actually giving anything up or making changes in our lives or economies now.

Notwithstanding these doubts, there is much to admire about Bill Gates. In an era of what Michael Mann calls “doom and gloomism,” he is positive, upbeat and optimistic. He really does believe that we can invent our way out of this and go from 51 billion to zero, instead of starting tomorrow with the renewable and storage technology that we have now. The problem is that we have run out of time, and the numbers don’t add up.

Lloyd Alter is design editor for Treehugger.com and author of the upcoming book Living the 1.5 Degree Lifestyle.

The post Bill Gates’s climate fixes don’t add up appeared first on Corporate Knights.

Is a revolution coming to dinner? Well, maybe.

These authors are calling for a revolution that will be driven by new ways to produce meat alternatives and grow real meat that will all but eliminate meat produced on so-called factory farms. Conventional meat, they say, will be replaced by plant-based alternatives from companies like Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods or, down the line, by so-called clean meat, a term used to describe meat that is grown from animal cells, without the need to raise or slaughter cows, pigs of chickens.

Clean meat “could be the biggest upheaval in how we produce food since the agricultural revolution some ten thousand years ago,” writes Shapiro, a vegan and lifelong animal-welfare activist who until very recently was vice president of policy engagement for the Humane Society of the United States .

Freston, an author, vegan and wellness expert, and Friedrich, the co-founder and executive director of the Good Food Institute, are also advocates. Their book envisions a future in which people look back at “the collective efforts of individuals, entrepreneurs and communities that pushed farmed animal protect from the centre of the plate to the side of it – and then off it entirely.”

The entrepreneurs featured in these books do not lack hubris. Hampton Creek, a company best known for its egg-free Just Mayo, has yet to sell an ounce of meat, but a sign outside the lab where it is developing technology to grow chicken from cell banks says: “DESTINATION: World’s Largest Meat Company by 2030.” Pat Brown, a Stanford biochemist and founder of Impossible Foods, last year told a reporter that “we fully intend to be producing 100 per cent of the ground beef in the world within the next decade or so.”

That strikes me as, er, impossible. But there’s no doubt that momentum is building behind alternatives to conventional meat, largely because of the toll that the industrial-scale farming of chickens, pigs and cows takes on the planet, on public health and, of course, on the animals. Food Navigator, a mainstream industry publication, chose cellular agriculture as the No. 1 food and beverage trend to watch in 2018, saying it has “the potential to completely transform the food supply.” The No. 2 trend? Plant-based innovation.

Hey, maybe a revolution is brewing.

Technology, after all, has transformed the way people treat other animals before. The slaughter of whales was ended in the 19th century when the discovery of kerosene eliminated the need for whale oil. Horses that once left piles of stinky manure on New York City streets gave way to cars. Today’s factory farms were enabled by antibiotics, hormones, pesticides, automatic feeders and air conditioning, without which it would be impossible “to cram tens of thousands of chickens or other animals into tiny coops, and produce meat and eggs with unprecedented efficiency – but also with unprecedented misery,” as Yuval Noah Hariri notes in the introduction to Clean Meat.

Shapiro’s Clean Meat is the better of these books. He’s a vegan and an animal-welfare activist but his book is well-researched and fair-minded. He delivers an inside look at Hampton Creek, Memphis Meats, Modern Meadow and Perfect Day, all of them companies that are trying to make meat, milk and leather without animals. He captures the excitement buzzing around these startups. And, to his credit, he grapples with the daunting obstacles facing clean meat: Technological (it’s hard to do), economic (it’s really, really expensive, now) and human (the ick factor that could be associated with consuming meat that was born in a laboratory). He quotes skeptics like Consumer Union’s Michael Hansen and food critic Marion Nestle, who say things like “the market isn’t going to want this” and “what’s wrong with food?”

Indeed, even among those vying to replace conventional meat, there’s debate over what path to take. Pat Brown, whose plant-based Impossible Burger is made from wheat, coconut oil, potatoes and an ingredient called heme, has said that growing real meat from cells is “one of the stupidest ideas ever.” Others argue that most consumers won’t settle for anything less than the taste and sizzle of real meat.

So far, the big money is betting on plant-based meat. Investors in Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods, whose products are  commercially available, include Bill Gates, Asian billionaire Li Ka-shing, venture capitalists Kleiner Perkins and Khosla Ventures, and Twitter co-founders Biz Stone and Evan Williams. Tyson Food owns five percent of Beyond Meat, which has raised about $72 million to date. Hampton Creek, which makes a variety of plant-based products, has raised about $220 million. Impossible Foods has raised about $275 million.

Cultured meat, a newer and riskier business, operates on a smaller scale. It will be years before Modern Meadow (which has raised $53 million), Memphis Meats (20 million) and Perfect Day ($2 million) make products that find their way onto grocery store shelves.

In the meantime, there are countless ways to enjoy what Kathy Freston and Bruce Friedrich call clean protein and avoid animal proteins. They argue, convincingly, that it’s easy to get plenty of protein without consuming animals. Citing scientific studies, they also write that the consumption of animal protein has been associated with heart disease, cancer, obesity, diabetes, Alzheimer’s disease, bone deterioration and impotence. About those claims, I’m skeptical, given our limited understanding of nutrition. Others, of course, blame carbs or sugar for many of those same ills. If you’re confused, join the club.

Freston and Friedrich are on more solid ground when they advise people on how to eat well. Reading Clean Protein led me to try plant-based substitutes for milk, eggs and cheese in the last few days, with mostly happy results. It persuaded me to add more beans and nuts to my diet. The fewer animal products that I consume, the better I feel, and the better I feel about myself.

Sadly, though, it’s unlikely that individual dietary changes, by themselves, will get us where we need to go. As Freston and Friedrich write:

Animal, environmental and health-care nonprofits have been encouraging a shift away from animal agriculture for decades. Nevertheless, meat consumption has gone up dramatically since that time, while the number of vegetarians has barely budged.

Change is hard.  I don’t know if we’re going to get a clean meat revolution. What I do know is that we need one.

The post Beyond meat appeared first on Corporate Knights.

Now it’s 2015. Gasoline is even cheaper and the low price of oil is actually encouraging economic growth, at least in some places. As Physicist Niels Bohr noted, “Prediction is very difficult, especially if it’s about the future.”

This hasn’t stopped Rubin. He’s back with his latest book The Carbon Bubble, setting himself up like Charlie Brown coming at Lucy holding the football with another analysis of where we are going. One has to ask: Is he going to hit the football or end up flat on his back?

Rubin follows the radical changes that have transformed the North American oil scene, and have turned the world upside down. Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper put all his chips into the Alberta oil sands at the cost of Eastern Canada’s manufacturing sector, which lost thousands of jobs due to the soaring petrodollar. But most of the oil is trapped there with nowhere to go; the Keystone XL pipeline is languishing and pipelines going east and west are being fought against tooth and nail. As opportunity calls, the railways turn their tracks into stand-in pipelines, moving thousands of old single-walled tank cars full of petroleum through the hearts of cities and towns. What could possibly go wrong?

Then Harper’s bet on Alberta goes totally south – literally – when hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, turns America once again into an oil and gas superpower. Suddenly, the price of oil is way below the cost of steaming it out of the rocks of Alberta. Rubin lays all this out in detail.

Ten years ago, when he was CIBC chief economist, Rubin wrote: “You know you are at the bottom of the ninth when you are schlepping a tonne of sand to get a barrel of oil.” This is truer now than it ever was. It just takes too much work, too much energy and creates too much carbon dioxide to try and boil oil out of dirt and rock.

Changes affecting the oil industry are happening so fast that Rubin can’t keep up, as he notes in his conclusion. “I’ve spent the better part of the editing process [of this book] changing verb tenses from future to present.”

Sometimes things slip through. Take this sentence in his chapter on the Alberta economy and troubles in the oil sands. “If I were Jim Prentice, I’d be giving some serious thought to Plan B.” Prentice, who was Alberta’s premier at the time Rubin wrote that chapter, has since been turfed by Alberta voters. Even Rubin could not have imagined that citizens had their own Plan B; that shortly after his book came out Albertans would elect a left-leaning NDP government in place of a Conservative Party that ruled for 44 consecutive years.

But Rubin makes clear it’s not all doom and gloom for Canada. The carbon bubble might be bursting, but other opportunities are opening up thanks to warmer temperatures. The prairies have long been Canada’s breadbasket, but as the seasons get longer, it may well switch to more profitable corn crops, the mainstay of the manufactured food industry.

Canada’s water, half being carelessly wasted as it runs into the Arctic or Hudson’s Bay, could be re-routed and sold to California, says Rubin. Or it could be converted to electricity. “Harnessing the incredible kinetic power generated by the movement of the country’s running surface water is yet another way in which Canada can capitalize on its most important resource,” he writes.

Given Canada’s water resources and expected changes to its climate, Rubin suggests the country return to its agricultural roots.

“In tomorrow’s world, a time of climate change and ever-tightening restrictions on carbon emissions, Canada stands a much better chance of becoming an agricultural superpower than it ever had of becoming an energy superpower.”

Fundamentally, from exporting water and hydropower to growing corn and shipping it through the Arctic, Rubin is suggesting that Canada take advantage of the benefits climate change could bring it at the expense of America, which will need water, food and low-carbon electricity.

Some will argue that Canada won’t do so well in a warming world. Others might complain that Canadians should aspire to be more than just hewers of wood and drawers of water. What’s certain is change isn’t just coming – it’s happening, so quickly that the book publishing cycle can’t keep up.

The post When the carbon bubble bursts appeared first on Corporate Knights.

That’s a lot of meat.

In Cowed, Denis Hayes, a prominent environmentalist who coordinated the first Earth Day in 1970, along with his wife Gail Boyer Hayes, an environmental lawyer, tell the story of that meat.

It’s not a horror story like so many anti-meat books, designed to scare you into vegetarianism. Both Mr. and Mrs. are rather fond of cows. Their aim, instead, is to convince the reader to eat less red meat and pay more for it. They take us on a generally pleasant tour of the cow scene, laying out their goals in the introduction:

“Our proposal is simple. It does not require civil disobedience, mass marches or expensive lawsuits. All it requires is that enough like-minded people seek out organic dairy products and grass-fed-and-finished beef. Most people can do this without busting their budgets by reducing their beef and dairy consumption to levels that are better for their health.”

First, they have to explain why. The number of cows out there is staggering – there are 93 million in America alone, which works out to roughly 55 million metric tonnes of cow.

Having fewer of them certainly would be a good thing for the environment. Eating a pound of beef, after all, has a greater climate impact than burning a gallon of gasoline. From the deforestation caused by the clearing of farmland for feed crops to the methane that comes from cow burps, livestock account for more than 14 per cent of anthropogenic GHGs. It also takes 3,280 litres of water to create a pound of grain-fed beef.

As Canadian author and scientist Vaclav Smil has noted, “few economic endeavors are as water-intensive as meat production in general and cattle feeding in particular.”

Cow factories – also known as concentrated animal feeding operations, or CAFOs – are environmental disasters. Cows eat a hundred pounds of feed per day and poop out almost as much. That waste is often pumped into sewage lagoons, which become giant lakes of contaminated water.

The crowded cows are also dosed with antibiotics that go right though them into the lagoons and into the water supply. In 2006, E. coli bacteria from cows got into several California vegetable farms, causing hundreds to get sick – and three actually died. Overall, the business is built on government subsidies and hidden costs as they relate to pollution, public health, loss of property value and environmental degradation.

Surprisingly, 42 per cent of cow meat is ground into hamburger, which opens up a whole new world of opportunity for adulteration and contamination. If it doesn’t sicken us quickly, it will kill us slowly, according to a Harvard study, which found that “people who eat more red meat have a significantly greater chance of dying from all causes.”

But really, the authors like cows, noting that “humans could survive without cows, but our lives would be poorer for it.” They visit contented cows on small farms and get to know them by name. It’s all very bucolic as we read about Tory and Taffy and Tufu and how they happily stroll up to their milking machines and nibble on organic treats. Author Vanessa Farquharson once called this “happy meat.”

In the Okanagan Valley, the cows are really happy. They get a litre of red wine each day. This produces more flavorful and better-textured meat. One dairy in Oregon actually supplies its cows with waterbeds, which cut down on conventional bedding costs and make the cows less stressed.

Could we all eat happy meat from happy cows? Sure, but industry and consumers would have to make some big changes. The authors propose a world where cows live in herds no larger than the farm has acreage for growing feed. That same land would have to sustainably absorb whatever cow poop is produced. “The end of feedlots will mean the end of cheap grocery store beef,” they write. “Beef will become a special food, served less often or in smaller portions… to be savored.”

They suggest that if we cut our consumption of meat and dairy in half, and only eat happy meat, “we can reduce pollution, global warming, medical costs, animal cruelty, loss of soil, loss of diversity, and germs resistant to antibiotics, while increasing the amount of land and water available for other uses.”

That doesn’t sound unreasonable.

The post For the love of cows appeared first on Corporate Knights.

OMG. Fiction. I don’t do fiction. Self-published. Kindle. About The Most Boring Subject In The World, carbon trading. Just kill me now. But then I look, and it is only 306 pages and costs all of $3.71. And I think, I’m man enough for this. I hit the Amazon one-touch order button, open my Retina-screened sepia toned iPad and start reading. It’s not that bad. Short, declarative Hemingwayish sentences. Cardboard characters, albeit FSC-certified cardboard. Perhaps it’s a candidate for the Literary Review’s Bad Sex in Fiction Award.

But there is a story here. It’s about Emil Pfeffer, who is, don’t hang up, the Director of the Integrity Unit of the United Nations Global Carbon Market Organization (GCMO), “a supervisory body, it oversees the operation of the carbon market; conducts research and analysis; and makes information available to governments so as to help the market work better.”

I am on page six when I read this and want to kill my editor. But wait, Emil starts explaining what he does, and I start learning stuff, like what carbon trading actually is, how the system might work, and how it might be monitored. Oh, and why it’s important.

Reality is, when there is a price on carbon, when it is being traded, there is going to be abuse and there is going to be cheating and we are going to need people keeping things honest. And that’s what gets our hero Emil arrested in Port Moseby, Papua New Guinea (PNG), almost blown up in Frankfurt, drugged in Zurich and mugged in Stuttgart, as the forces of evil try to stop him from figuring out what is going on in the so-called carbon sink-protected forests of PNG. It’s exciting.

There’s sex, cannibalism, drugs and a whole lot of money floating around in this little book, but there are also a lot of questions. Have I just got a relatively painless education in how carbon trading works? I certainly know more than I did, but it doesn’t inspire confidence in the concept.

Five years ago many of us would buy carbon offsets, paying to plant trees to compensate for the CO2 produced during our plane flights. I suspect not many of us do anymore, after seeing so many stories about how carbon offsets really don’t work well.

Carbon Black is a novel built around the premise that nations are promising to prevent deforestation through carbon trading, and yet evil and greedy forces are taking the money and destroying the forests anyway.

Notwithstanding the fact that our hero is a UN-appointed bureaucrat with occasionally fancy footwork and sharp elbows, I am not convinced a whole lot of carbon is being sequestered. It doesn’t inspire confidence in the integrity of the system.

The author, Declan Milling, “has over 30 years experience practising as an environmental lawyer” and a background in environmental science. Working in the U.K. now, he is from Australia and knows the territory geographically and technically. He says in an interview with one of his book reviewers that he has “an interest in trying to make the issues and themes of what is an esoteric, and often inaccessible subject matter, more accessible through putting it into a more generally acceptable form, namely the political thriller novel genre.”

Indeed, it is a challenge explaining carbon trading, why there might be organizations like the GCMO regulating it, why activists like the character Dominik are dubious about it, why anarchists might riot over it, how banks and investors – both honest and corrupt – will try to cash in on it, and then turn it into a book that you want to spend a Saturday afternoon reading.

Raymond Chandler and Elmore Leonard don’t have to worry about their place in the pantheon. But they weren’t trying to write a story about something as tedious as carbon trading. Milling succeeds in making it interesting and even exciting; after all it’s not exactly, as Dashiell Hammett wrote of the Maltese Falcon, the stuff that dreams are made of.

The post Book review: Carbon Black appeared first on Corporate Knights.

When I saw the roster of contributors I became even more suspicious: Mary Schapiro, former chair of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Barbara Novick, vice chairman of BlackRock, Roger Martin, academic director of the Martin Prosperity Institute at the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, just to name a few.

The book’s editor, John Taft, is the CEO of RBC Wealth Management, the eighth largest brokerage firm in the United States with over $281 billion in assets under management.

Should we really let these people – who were in the middle of the 2008-09 financial crisis – restore our faith in capitalism?

I imagined a lot of stale arguments being made by people who were desperate to maintain a broken system. But the book, released today, does quite the opposite.

It brings to light this uniquely awkward moment we find ourselves in. One in which the current form of capitalism clearly isn’t working, but we haven’t found a new way forward yet.

And depending on how you feel about capitalism, it is either unnerving or thrilling to read that this group financial experts  sees a new economic paradigm on the horizon.

No one can say what this new paradigm will look like, or even what it will be called. The book is simply “an effort to pick [the brains of experts] at a time when many of the quasi-axiomatic assumptions underlying modern capitalism are being called into question,” says Taft in the book’s introduction.

Rather than focus on what went wrong, Taft’s goal was to curate a collection of essays that describe what needs to be done to “adapt to the tectonic shifts going on beneath the surface of capitalism.

This means doing a much better job of listening to and understanding what society wants, and then actually following through on those commitments, says Taft.

A large part of following through is completing the regulatory reform that began after the financial crisis.

Taft dedicates an entire section of the book to making sure that the new regulatory regime strikes “the right balance between social stability, [profitability] and economic growth.” Too much or too little regulation could have enormous long-term consequences for society, he says.

At an event in Toronto earlier this month, Taft compared this balancing act to flying an airplane without a control panel.

But even if the perfect balance is achieved, Taft and his fellow contributors are adamant that real change will not come from further regulation of the financial sector.

“One cannot legislate integrity,” say the authors from the Center for Ethical Business Cultures. “It must come from inside the corporation. It requires leadership with the highest ethical standards,” they say.

The other contributors are equally committed to re-imagining the fundamental role that finance plays in society. At times, their beliefs are so impassioned that the term “enlightened finance” takes on a slightly new-age tone.

“The goals served by finance originate within us. They reflect our interests in careers, hopes for our families, ambitions for our businesses, aspirations for our cultures and ideals for our society,” says Robert Shiller, economist at Yale University.

He goes on to remind us that finance is not just about making money. It’s about achieving worthy goals like saving enough money to grow old with dignity, being able to attend college, buying your first home.

From there, David Blood, co-founder of Generation Investment Management, makes a case for “sustainable capitalism,” while John Fullerton, founder of the Capital Institute, describes his vision of “regenerative capitalism.” Both aim to prioritize human survival on the planet above GDP growth.

In what Taft considers to be one of the most original pieces in the book, John Rogers, former president and CEO of the CFA Institute, introduces the concept of “universal owners.”

Certain funds, such as the Government Pension Fund of Norway, have grown so large that they “own virtually every economic and social outcome of what the world’s corporations and governments are doing,” says Rogers. In other words, “they have no place to hide.”

These mega-funds have a greater responsibility than anyone else to make sure their investments produce positive, long-term outcomes for society. If they combine their influence on behalf of their constituents, then a new age of “fiduciary capitalism” may be upon us, says Rogers.

Shiller expects that any attempt to improve and democratize capitalism will be to the dismay of radicals. But all of this sounds pretty close to what Occupy Wall Street activists were asking for back in 2011: a financial system that takes responsibility for its mistakes and responds to the needs of society.

Restoring and maintaining faith in capitalism has always been that simple. It’s up to leaders to take it seriously.

The post A Force for Good appeared first on Corporate Knights.

Law of the Jungle is Paul Barrett’s telling tale of young lawyer Steven Donziger and his “obsessive crusade – waged at any cost” to bring an oil giant to justice for environ­mental crimes that go back decades. The giant in focus is Texaco (now part of Chev­ron), which drilled the rainforest and left 400,000 barrels of oil in toxic ponds, poi­soning rivers and the people who lived on them. (Chevron maintains it met all clean­up obligations and that Ecuador released it of liability in 1998).

It’s even more exciting when you’ve been to the scene of the crime. I visited Amazonian Ecuador in 2009 as a guest of the Rainforest Alliance. While there, I saw these toxic ponds and met the people af­fected by them. I also learned how these people were trying to maintain a life on the rivers and in the forest that didn’t involve working for the oil company. The damage is real and continues to this day as oil com­panies drive deeper into the national parks and lands of the Yasuni people.

Steven Donziger was a single man who was up against one of the world’s biggest corporations. The most surprising thing is that he wasn’t squished like a bug years ago. This was a corporation that could have properly treated the waste it created for a couple of million dollars in 1980. In doing so, it could have avoided spending many times that amount on lawyers and investi­gators over the past 20 years as it attempted to shut Donziger down.

Instead, Donziger went from success to astonishing success, winning a $9.5-billion (U.S.) judgement in Ecuador and cutting a swathe across the world as he tried to tie up Chevron assets from Argentina to Ontario. He turned Ecuador into the centre of the environmental universe, with Bianca Jagger, Daryl Hannah and Al Gore as bit players in the drama. Donziger knew how to play the media, the Ecuadorian courts, and public opinion; he was on a roll.

That is, until it all fell apart last March in New York, where U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan called the Ecuador judg­ment the product of “egregious fraud” and imposed an injunction that bars Donziger from keeping any money resulting from the foreign ruling. Donziger has since appealed the ruling.

Barrett, it should be noted, is a writer and editor at Bloomberg Businessweek and is no environmentalist. It’s clear he is less interested in the sins of Chevron than the sins of Donziger, who in September filed a “notice of defamation” against Barrett and book publisher Random House.

Donziger did appear to overplay his hand and overstep the lines. He is now ac­cused of writing the Ecuadorian judge’s decision himself, fabricating evidence and promising bribes. I could fill out this entire review with all of the exciting legal chica­nery that has been alleged, but that would ruin the fun.

Sadly, this book is being interpreted by many in the business press as evidence that the law should be changed to prohibit these kinds of suits; that corporations are being abused. Forbes magazine, for exam­ple, picked up on Barrett’s statement in his conclusion that “nothing has done more to weaken the reputation of the class action as a legal tool than the tendency of celebrated plaintiffs’ lawyers to overstep ethical lines.”

But this misses the point. Peter Maass, author of Crude World, a book about the oil business that includes a chapter about Ec­uador, notes that “the worst culprit in this case isn’t a quixotic lawyer who misplayed the bad hand dealt to him but the company that almost everyone agrees acted in a rep­rehensible way for decades.”

Law of the Jungle is a wonderful legal thriller and an easy and entertaining read, but it seems to me that the author can’t see the rainforest for the trees. Texaco and Chevron are long gone, replaced by the gov­ernment oil company Petroecuador.

President Rafael Correa, hugely popular among the poor, essentially put a gun to the head of the Yasuni, demanding that the rest of the world put up money to stop oil ex­ploration or the rainforest gets it. The rest of the world said no and the rainforest con­tinues to get hacked away, the rivers con­tinue being polluted and poisoned, and the astonishing disparity between the wealthy and the poor continues to widen.

This is a book about a lawyer fighting a big company. The big company is winning, and Donziger has proved to be no Erin Brockov­ich. But there is an important book still to be written about what really happened in Ec­uador, and what continues to happen to the rainforest and the people there.

The post It’s a jungle out there appeared first on Corporate Knights.

As for the title, Winston explains it this way: “If you believe that these pressures are real, then what has until now been called green business, or sustainability, cannot be a side department or a niche conversation in commerce.” Indeed, he continues, “we must pivot – sometimes painfully, always purposefully, so that solving the world’s biggest challenges profitably becomes the core pursuit of business.”

But first, Winston has to convince us about the seriousness of the challenges we face, and it’s a tough sell. He presents the hard data on climate change, but admits that it is easy for some to write off because the warming numbers don’t sound particularly scary; having shivered through this Canadian summer, they sound actually quite pleasant. He quotes one scientist: “You almost couldn’t design a problem that is a worse fit with our underlying psychology.” It’s so true. Unfortunately, for a short book a lot of space is given to a subject that most readers already know, yet it is not likely to change the minds of skeptics.

The mega-challenge of resource scarcity, however, is more immediate and obviously a business problem as commodity prices go through the roof and water becomes scarce. Food prices also increase as corn, soy and palm oil are diverted to biofuels; water supplies are challenged as they’re diverted to lawns and fracking. The business case for a big pivot here is more compelling.

The final mega-challenge is the challenge of transparency. Winston claims that every company that wants to remain competitive needs to answer tough questions about its supply chain and its environmental and social performance, “especially the ones coming from business customers.” Everybody is watching and there is nowhere to hide, so companies have to clean up their act. Or, as author and new-economy thinker Don Tapscott puts it, “If we’re all going to get naked, we better get buff.”

Winston is least convincing here. Transparency is a challenge, yes, but doesn’t seem to have a “mega” quality. There doesn’t appear to be a whole lot of buffing up of corporate bodies going on – at least not across the board. Lobbying still continues by some industries, such as “Big Ag” and the chemical industry, to block laws aimed at increasing transparency. In Germany, some politicians are even considering switching from computers to typewriters to stop prying eyes.

Most of Winston’s 10 “radically practical strategies” will be familiar to regular readers of Corporate Knights as part of the ideal of Clean Capitalism; titles like “Fight short-termism” and “Set big science-based goals” will ring a bell. However, the final strategy is more than a big pivot, it’s a whole new spin: “Build a resilient, anti-fragile company.”

Diversity makes organizations stronger. Variety makes crops more pest- and weather-resistant. A company, Winston writes, “with just one product line, technology or service that brings in the vast majority of its profits is at great risk.” He describes how a flood in Thailand nearly closed Honda when the only factories producing a few critical parts lost production. “A bit of redundancy in the system might be worth the expense if it avoids serious and expensive disruptions.” Indeed, resilient companies mimic nature, which gives us backup kidneys and eyeballs. Nature doesn’t put all its eggs in one fragile basket.

Winston is a techno-optimist who believes that if these strategies are followed we can build a resilient, green and profitable world. He thinks that the coal industry will be gone and that fossil fuel companies will either get into renewables or become much smaller organizations. It’s a stretch when Canada is building pipelines and the U.S. is shipping coal to China that’s too dirty to be used in America; where Scotland is basing independence on new North Sea oil finds. But perhaps that’s just my short-termist thinking.

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This inspirational manifesto, “We envision a new sector of the economy which harnesses the power of private enterprise to create public benefit,” sets the tone for Honeyman’s thorough examination of Certified B Corporations, also known as B Corps.

There are more than 1,100 certified B Corps around the globe. This book, which is a practical and useful, step-by-step guide on how to become a B Corp, will likely accelerate the growth of these companies.

The guide covers the genesis behind the founding of B Lab, the nonprofit entity that created the B Corp framework, then blazes a trail through the benefits of becoming a B Corp, the assessment required to become certified as one, and a helpful section on getting started quickly.

The book’s greatest strength is its clear-headed explanation of the certification process and the online assessment tool, which enables companies to measure, compare and improve their social and environmental performance. A minimum score determined by the online assessment tool is required to formally qualify as a B Corp. As Honeyman points out, this is a good (and free) resource for companies, even if they do not intend to certify, because it allows them to measure their performance and compare it against others.

Honeyman also clears up a common source of confusion by discussing the similarities and distinctions between Certified B Corporations and Benefit Corporations. The latter is a relatively new legal structure in the United States. Unlike more established corporate forms – such as Limited Liability Corporations (LLC) or C Corporations – Benefit Corporations are a specific class of corporation that is required to create a material impact on society and the environment. Certification as a B Corp is not required to be a Benefit Corporation, though the two overlap in purpose.

As an experienced sustainability consultant, Honeyman is articulate and straightforward in his approach. The book is an easy yet thoughtful read. Maybe that’s a good thing because the target audience is about as time crunched as any group.

To his credit, Honeyman does not let his opinions steal the show. He cites credible research and often gets out of the way to let B Corps tell their own stories, from 200-year-old King Arthur Flour to sustainability leader Patagonia, to Etsy, to Juhudi Kilimo, an asset-based finance and training firm in Kenya.

The book could be strengthened by adding data on the aggregate impact of the movement to date. It would be interesting to know how much measurable and meaningful impact the community of over 1,000 B Corps has contributed since certified B Corps first arrived on the scene in 2007.

Of course, while numbers seem to rule the business world, we should not forget the human drive for community that propels this book and the movement it chronicles. “The B Corp movement reconnected me with something that I had forgotten: the incredible power of being part of a community that shares my core values and a clear sense of purpose,” says Honeyman.

If you’re curious about new business models, you should give this book a read. And if you’re interested in using business as a force for good, this book is required reading.

Russ Stoddard is founder and president of Oliver Russell, which builds brands for purpose-driven companies and causes. Oliver Russell is a Certified B Corporation.

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Klein’s book does everything a good self-help book should: It urges the reader to admit they have a problem, it provides a narrative to better understand their issues and it gives them the tools they need to make a change. This Changes Everything does all of this with great to moderate success.

Left unchecked, “our culture will do what it is already doing, only with more brutality and barbarism, because that is what our system is built to do,” Klein says with trademark frankness.

Like a bad relationship, Klein shows us that our reliance on endless consumption, free market mentality and extractive culture have left us isolated and convinced that we are not only incapable of saving ourselves, but we are actually not worth saving at all.

Klein is at her best when she is showing, in plain terms, how systemic forces are affecting our planet, our communities and our personal lives. The connections that she draws between global events are so obvious and simple that it seems as if we must have known these things all along. This may be the secret behind her “clairvoyant skill of nailing a subject before anyone gets there,” as her friend Katharine Viner, U.S. editor in chief of The Guardian, explained in Vogue last month.

But when you look closely, you can see that Klein is not telling us anything new; she is re-telling and re-contextualizing many familiar stories to give us a more cohesive picture of current events.

Take, for example, the story of two parallel negotiations that took place during the 1980s: climate and free trade. The former is regulated based on an honor system, while the latter is enforced by a dispute settlement system with monetary consequences for offenders. One puts limits on big business in order to protect the planet; the other protects big business from those exact regulations. It is no wonder corporations and governments do not take climate negotiations seriously.

Klein’s reminder of our priorities in the 1980s makes it easy to think that simply rewriting trade rules in favor of the planet can solve the climate crisis.

But, of course, it can’t be that simple. If we stand a chance of surviving on this planet, Klein says we not only need to rewrite the international trade rules that have governed our economies for the last few decades; we also need “managed de-growth,” or more dramatically, “The Great Transition.”

Any solution to the climate crisis outside of radical economic transformation Klein dubs “magical thinking.” We cannot rely on the market, billionaire philanthropists or even technology to save us. Instead, she says, we need a “mass movement of movements” that will force governments to revive the lost arts of long-term planning and saying “no” to fossil fuel companies.

Movement matters

Klein’s first book No Logo is considered by many to be the “Bible” of the anti-globalization movement—the first iteration of the “movement of movements” that successfully shut down the World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle in 1999. This Changes Everything chronicles how Klein (and her readers) got from No Logo to today.

While the anti-globalization era of protest was intentionally amorphous and without clear leadership or direction—a direct response to the hierarchical, oppressive global systems that the movement was attempting to challenge—climate change has finally given these groups something around which to coalesce.

To anyone who was paying attention to the United Nations Fifteenth Conference of the Parties (COP15) in 2009, it was clear that something new was happening on the streets of Copenhagen — the climate justice movement was being born. This moment of crystallization, which Klein describes so well, has unprecedented potential to solve not only climate change, but also a wide array of problems that the world’s most vulnerable populations are facing.

The urgency of the climate crisis has formed “the basis of a powerful mass movement, one that would weave all these seemingly disparate issues into a coherent narrative about how to protect humanity from the ravages of both a savagely unjust economic system and a destabilizing climate system,” says Klein.

But it’s precisely at this moment – when Klein switches from speaking about the past to the present – where the book’s tone goes from prophetic to slightly depressing. This movement of movements, while inspirational, has had few concrete successes so far and has a long way to go (and will face much more violent repression along the way) before it will achieve the kind of transition that Klein says we need.

Protest groups, such as Idle No More and 350.org, which stalled the Keystone XL pipeline, have without a doubt affected our collective consciousness, increased the power of Indigenous groups and damaged the social license of extractive companies. But the level of collective action that will be required to make the kinds of changes that is Klein advocating for have few, if any, historical precedents.

Yet, tens of thousands of people from across the United States are preparing to descend on New York City for the People’s Climate March next Sunday, which is expected to be the largest climate march to date. Their aim is to begin pressuring United Nations member states to come up with a binding agreement that will replace the Kyoto protocol, which comes up for renewal in 2015.

And with dozens of groups around the world marching in their own streets, it could be a day when the “movement of movements” shows its potential to push for the kind of systemic change that Klein (who is the keynote speaker at the event in New York City) is looking for. In that sense, the release of Klein’s book is well timed, and I expect to see a copy in the hands of many an activist next week.

Corporate Knights will be covering the United Nations Climate Summit, as well as the Peoples Climate March in New York City from September 19 to 23.

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