If we don’t get to a much stronger place soon, we may cease to be a nation-state at all.

We’ve long been aware of the risks of the elephant next door. We have risen to the challenge when called for, before and after Confederation. 

When the United States invaded Upper Canada in 1812, under the leadership of British Major-General Robert Ross, we literally ate their dinner (President Madison fled, leaving an untouched feast) and burned the White House down.

The boldest play we can make is to forge a soup-to-nuts clean energy superpower, from critical minerals and batteries to smart grids, financial wizardry and engineering know-how.

After Confederation, to unite Canada and thwart U.S. expansionism, Sir John A. Macdonald, along with a team of builders and financial wizards, led the most consequential nation-building project in our history, pounding in the last spike of the 4,700-kilometre Canadian Pacific Railway in 1885.

The elephant and the polar bear

Here we are in 2025 with the elephant trumpeting again. Trudeau Sr. likened us to a mouse in this dynamic, but by relative weight – and I hope attitude – we are more of a polar bear. What would a polar bear do? According to Inuit lore, polar bears are seen as powerful spiritual beings embodying strength, resilience and adaptability. A polar bear knows the full meaning of “We the North,” and a polar bear never rolls over (unless it’s playing or cleaning itself). 

How do we build a stronger Canada? It starts with a stronger economy.

We can take inspiration from some of our winter sport heroes. We need to “skate to where the puck is going.” That means investing where fortunes are rising, not falling. With apologies to Harold Innis, the famed political economist, hewing wood and drawing water (and, soon, drilling for oil ) is not where the money is. The clean energy economy is the locomotive for 21st-century growth. As measured by Corporate Knights and others, it is growing twice as fast as the rest of the economy and is now the dominant driver of economic growth across sectors and the world. 

The boldest play we can make is to forge a soup-to-nuts clean energy superpower, from critical minerals and batteries to smart grids, financial wizardry and engineering know-how. 

We have all the ingredients to do this. The only thing missing is leadership.

We have a need for speed

It’s one thing to say we are going to be a clean energy superpower; it’s quite another to make it happen. The goons from the status quo industries have been going into the corner and coming out with the puck for a long time: case in point, 10 years after Trudeau was elected on a promise to price pollution, the biggest oil companies are still polluting for free. That’s why we need to keep our elbows up, to make sure we don’t lose the puck.

Markets and geopolitics are moving too fast for us to go slow. No time for Royal commissions or expert panels. We have a need for speed. Like the masters of metamorphosis featured on p. 32, we need to dare to push the limits of what is possible, faster than we have ever gone before. 

In the spirit of friendlier times with our neighbour, we can take a page out of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s first 100 days, where he passed 15 major bills and delinked the dollar from the gold standard, laying the way for major public investments (in the order of 6% of GDP for six years) that saved the United States from the Depression. 

Let us hope the next leader of our land brings the resilient spirit of a polar bear, the vision of the Great One (on the ice, not off), the sharp elbows of Mr. Hockey and the daring speed of the Crazy Canucks. Mix all that with a little financial wizardry, and we will make magic happen.

Toby Heaps is the co-founder, publisher and CEO of Corporate Knights. 

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People the Planet Needs Now tells the stories of 25 scientists and activists working to protect and support their racialized and Indigenous communities in a changing climate.

The shoulders on which these younger folk stand are partially revealed by the next two environmental-justice-related titles: the new memoir by Catherine Coleman Flowers and the recently released classic by Robert Bullard and Beverly Wright.

The Bullard and Wright book provides a bridge of sorts to the more academic titles that follow, works that shift the focus from “environmental justice” to “climate justice.”

Among this second set of three titles, the new book by prolific legal scholar Cass Sunstein is likely to garner the most attention. Readers can get a preview of his take on climate justice from his interview with New York Times climate columnist David Wallace-Wells. Not Just Green, Not Just White and Climate Justice and the University complement Sunstein’s philosophical overview with deeper dives into environmental history and higher education.

Critical social histories make up the third rank, with new titles on “land power,” the Caribbean, and an activist, anti-consumerist “church” in the Alphabet City neighbourhood of New York City.

This month’s selections end with three recently published volumes of climate fiction: Library of America’s new collection of Afrofuturist stories and new novels from East Africa and Indigenous Australia. The two novels, it should be noted, made the long list for the first-ever Climate Fiction Prize. The short list for the prize will be announced next month; the winning title will be named in May.

As always, the descriptions of the titles are adapted from copy provided by their publishers. When two dates of publication are listed, the second is for the paperback edition.

People the Planet Needs Now: Voices for Justice, Science and a Future of Promise by Dudley Edmundson (Adventure Books 2025, 264 pages, $30)

Heroes among us are fighting for a better world – and many of them are Black, Indigenous, and other people of colour (BIPOC). Acclaimed author and photographer Dudley Edmondson has interviewed 25 racialized scientists, environmental justice activists, and social justice activists to inspire change on a global scale. Along with the full-colour photographs, his book offers a rare opportunity to see and hear from BIPOC scientists and activists about problems with “traditional” science and the current methods of addressing everything from climate change to city design. Racialized people around the globe have an interdependent relationship with nature, and their perspectives can help us push for positive change. People the Planet Needs Now strives to inspire difference-makers to create a better world together.

Holy Ground: On Activism, Environmental Justice, and Finding Hope by Catherine Coleman Flowers (Spiegel & Grau 2025, 240 pages, $28)

See also Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden by poet and scholar Camille T. Dungy (Simon & Schuster 2023/2024, 364 pages, $19.99 paperback)

The Wrong Complexion for Protection: How the Government Response to Disaster Endangers African American Communities by Robert D. Bullard and Beverly Wright (New York

University Press 2012/2023, 313 pages, $19.99 paperback)

When the images of desperate, hungry, thirsty, sick, mostly Black people circulated in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, it became apparent to the whole country that race did indeed matter when it came to government assistance. In The Wrong Complexion for Protection, Robert D. Bullard and Beverly Wright place the government response to natural and human-induced disasters in historical context over the past eight decades. They assess how the government responded to different emergencies and show that African Americans are disproportionately affected. Uncovering and eliminating disparate disaster response, they argue, can mean the difference between life and death for those most vulnerable in disastrous times.

Not Just Green, Not Just White: Race, Justice, and Environmental History, edited by Mary E. Mendoza and Traci Brynne Voyles (University of Nebraska Press 2025, 536 pages, $35.00 paperback)

Environmental history has been defined as the study of the changing relationships between humans and the environment – or nature. Not Just Green, Not Just White aims to redefine the field, arguing that neither humans nor the environment are monolithic actors. Both are diverse, and often the environment causes conflict between and among peoples, leaving unequal access and power in its wake. Just as important, these histories often reveal how, despite unequal power, those who carry less privilege still persist. Together the essays in this volume reveal how, when practitioners in the field move away from “green” and “white” topics, they will be able to explain much more about our collective past than anyone ever imagined.

Climate Justice: What Rich Nations Owe the World – and the Future by Cass Sunstein (MIT Press 2025, 216 pages, $29.95)

If you’re injuring someone, you should stop – and pay for the damage you’ve caused. Why, this book asks, does this simple proposition, generally accepted, not apply to climate change? In Climate Justice, a bracing challenge to status quo thinking, renowned legal scholar Cass Sunstein clearly frames what’s at stake and lays out the moral imperative: when it comes to climate change, everyone must be counted equally, regardless of when or where they live – which means that wealthy nations, which have disproportionately benefited from greenhouse gas emissions, are obliged to help future generations and people in poor, particularly vulnerable, nations.

Climate Justice and the University: Shaping a Hopeful Future for All by Jennie C. Stephens

Higher education can play a powerful role in addressing the intersecting crises of climate change and inequality. Institutions of higher education hold untapped potential to advance social justice and reduce climate injustices. However, universities are not yet structured to accelerate social change for the public good. In Climate Justice and the University, Jennie Stephens reimagines the potential of higher education to advance human well-being and promote ecological health. Drawing on more than 30 years of experience working on the climate crisis within higher education, she invites readers to collectively reimagine different priorities and structures within higher education, and suggests ways to shape a more equitable future for all.

See also Teach for Climate Justice: A Vision for Transforming Education by Tom Roderick (Harvard Education Press 2023, 296 pages, $39 paperback)

Land Power: Who Has It, Who Doesn’t, and How That Determines the Fate of Societies by Michael Albertus (Basic Books 2025, 336 pages, $30)

Modern history has been defined by land reallocation on a massive scale. From the 1500s on, European colonial powers and new nation-states shifted Indigenous lands into the hands of settlers. The 1900s brought new waves of land appropriation, in the forms of Soviet and Maoist collectivization. The shuffle continues today as governments vie for power and prosperity by choosing who should get land. Drawing on a career’s worth of original research, Albertus shows that choices about who owns the land have locked in poverty, sexism, racism and climate crisis – and that what we do with the land today can change our collective fate. Global in scope, Land Power argues that saving civilization must begin with the earth under our feet.

Dark Laboratory: On Columbus, The Caribbean, and the Origins of the Climate Crisis by Tao Leigh Goffe (Doubleday 2025, 384 pages, $35)

In 1492, Christopher Columbus arrived on the Caribbean Island of Guanahaní to find an Edenic scene that was soon mythologized. But the Caribbean people would come to pay the price of relentless Western exploitation and abuse. In Dark Laboratory, Dr. Tao Leigh Goffe charts the forces that shaped these islands: the legacy of slavery, indentured labour and the forced toil of enslaved people who mined the islands’ bounty – all for the benefit of European powers and at the expense of the islands’ sacred ecologies. Through the lens of the Caribbean, Goffe closely situates the origins of racism and climate catastrophe within a colonial context. But his book is also a declaration of hope and an impassioned, urgent testament to the human capacity for change and renewal.

The Church of Stop Shopping and Religious Activism: Combatting Consumerism and Climate Change Through Performance by George Gonzalez (NYU Press 2024, 352 pages, $35 paperback)

The Black Fantastic: 20 Afrofuturist Stories, edited by andre m. carrington (Library of America 2025, 384 pages, $24.95 paperback)

With Afrofuturist pioneers like Octavia E. Butler and Samuel R. Delany, a new generation of Black writers is fashioning a renaissance in speculative fiction. Edited and introduced by SF expert andré m. carrington, The Black Fantastic brings together Hugo, Locus, Nebula, Tiptree/Otherwise and World Fantasy Award winners with emerging voices to showcase this watershed moment in American literature. Here are 20 beguiling, unsettling and visionary stories spanning the cosmos and a dazzling array of alternate timelines. Reimagining the past and laying claim to the future, these writers bring forth kaleidoscopic new visions of Black identity and creative freedom in stories that are, by turns, comic, provocative and terrifying.

Water Baby: A Novel by Chioma Okereke (Quercus Books 2024/2025, 17.99 paperback)

In Makoko, the floating slum off mainland Lagos, Nigeria, 19-year-old Baby yearns for an existence where she can escape the future her father has planned for her. With opportunities scarce, Baby jumps at the chance to join a newly launched drone-mapping project, aimed at broadening the visibility of her community.

Then a video of her at work goes viral and Baby finds herself with options she could never have imagined – including the possibility of leaving her birthplace to represent Makoko on the world stage. But will life beyond the lagoon be everything she’s dreamed of? Or has everything she wants been in front of her all along?

Praiseworthy: A Novel by Alexis Wright (New Directions 2024, 672 pages, $22.95)

In a small town in the north of Australia, a mysterious haze cloud heralds both an ecological catastrophe and a gathering of the ancestors. A visionary on his own holy quest, Cause Man Steel seeks the perfect platinum donkey to launch an Aboriginal-owned donkey transport industry, saving Country and the world from fossil fuels. His wife, Dance, studies butterflies and dreams of repatriating her family to China. One of their sons, named Aboriginal Sovereignty, is determined to end it all by walking into the sea. Their other child, Tommyhawk, wants nothing more than to be adopted by Australia’s most powerful white woman. Praiseworthy is an epic masterpiece that bends time and reality – a cry of outrage against oppression, greed and assimilation.

This article by Yale Climate Connections is published here as part of the global journalism collaboration Covering Climate Now. It has been edited to conform with Corporate Knights style.

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An hour later, the Washington, D.C.–based Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) chimed in: “We sued Donald Trump 163 times during his first term, and we’re ready to do it again.” 

“Despair is not an option,” said San Francisco–based Earthjustice. “Last time around, Earthjustice filed more than 200 cases in response to the Trump administration’s policies. We won 85% of the decisions – and we’ll do it again.”

Becoming an environmental advocate is very much motivated by idealism. You certainly don’t get rich doing climate work.

– Andrew Wetzler, senior vice president for nature, Natural Resources Defense Council

Earthjustice urged worried Americans to support Biden-era emissions regulations and challenge Republican efforts to reopen public lands to drilling. The non-profit also vowed to up its state-level litigation: it’s fighting to electrify school bus fleets in New York and Washington, decarbonize homes in California and Maryland, and halt plans for gas plants in nine states and Puerto Rico.

Lawyers make unlikely heroes. In a 2015 American Bar Association survey of the public, 69% said that “lawyers are more interested in making money than in serving clients.” In a 2023 Gallup poll, just 16% rated lawyers’ ethics as “high” or “very high.”

NRDC’s Andrew Wetzler, senior vice president for nature, shuns the “hero” mantle: “In a judicial setting, anyone can be heard – even in the face of a powerful government.” Still, he agrees that environmental lawyers are a breed apart. “Becoming an environmental advocate is very much motivated by idealism,” he says. “You certainly don’t get rich doing climate work.”

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Canada’s climate lawyers have also earned a shout-out. Vancouver-based Ecojustice is Canada’s largest environmental law charity, with 35 lawyers. Among its cases, it’s fighting for Indigenous Peoples’ right of consultation on major projects and  the rights of youth (Mathur et al) opposing Ontario’s rollback of carbon targets, a challenge that produced the first judicial ruling that climate inaction may violate Canadians’ Charter rights. 

Ecojustice executive director Tracy London says that Canada’s environmental lawyers share their U.S. colleagues’ “ferocity.” But rather than count wins and losses, she says that Ecojustice measures its success “in being thought leaders, ensuring that environmental law remains a thoughtful, vigorous way to hold governments accountable.” 

Rick Spence is a business writer, speaker and consultant in Toronto specializing in entrepreneurship, innovation and growth. He is also a senior editor at Corporate Knights.

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It has been a long and obstacle-ridden road for Juliana v. United States, a case that argues that the government’s actions that cause climate change have violated the youngest generation’s constitutional rights to life, liberty and property.   

“This is no ordinary lawsuit,” Judge Ann Aiken, the Oregon District Court judge who has presided over much of the legal drama, declared back in 2016, when she first paved the way for the lawsuit to proceed to trial. In that ruling, Aiken denied a motion by the administration of President Barack Obama to have the case dismissed for lack of subject-matter jurisdiction. The case was groundbreaking because it was the first to frame a climate case around constitutional rights. And it would have been the first time that fossil fuel policy confronted climate science in the courts in the U.S. But that trial never happened, and instead it has been years of the Obama, Trump and most recently Biden administrations trying to delay, halt or vanquish the lawsuit altogether. It is no wonder, as the youth originally went for the climate jugular, so to speak, demanding that the court order the government to “swiftly phase-down CO2 emissions aimed at atmospheric CO2 concentrations that are no more than 350 [parts per million] by 2100, develop a national plan to restore Earth’s energy balance, and implement that national plan so as to stabilize the climate system.” They later pared down their demands in response to a court ruling.   

The case appeared to have crossed its last hurdle in December, as Judge Aiken declared – again – that the youth could proceed to a trial. And then a new barrage of opposing motions emanated from the Department of Justice, under President Joe Biden, including an unprecedented seventh petition (following six by the Trump administration) for “writ of mandamus,” a rare legal tool that would shut down the case before evidence is heard. In May, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals granted the petition.   

But if the government is relentless, so too are the youth. In September, they filed a motion at the Supreme Court, asking it to “reverse an egregious error” by the Ninth Circuit Court that “flagrantly disregarded” the limits Congress and the Supreme Court placed on its jurisdiction. “This case is about addressing the climate crisis and protecting our fundamental rights like our right to life and freedom,” said 18-year-old Avery, one of the plaintiffs in the case, in a statement. “However, it is also about ensuring access to justice.”  

Juliana v. United States is one of a number of youth-driven climate cases that have experienced varying degrees of success in the U.S. and abroad. Last year, a Montana judge ruled that the state of Montana violated the constitutional rights of 16 young plaintiffs to a clean and healthful environment through legislation, enacted in 2011, that limits the environmental factors that can be considered when approving oil and gas projects. The court declared that legislation unconstitutional and ordered that Montana consider climate change and the emission of greenhouse gases when approving fossil fuel projects. An appeal of that decision was heard in July, and a decision is pending.   

RELATED:

How a landmark youth climate ruling in Montana is reverberating across Canada

Heroes: How these Swiss seniors won first-ever climate case in international court

Courts open the door to more climate lawsuits

In Canada, a decision is still pending on Mathur v. Ontario, the first Charter-based climate case to reach a trial in this country. A court dismissed the case in 2023, but the seven youth who brought the arguments forward appealed that decision in January and are awaiting a ruling. Another Canadian youth climate case involving 14 children and teens from seven provinces and one territory will be proceeding to trial, expected to take place in 2025.   

Lawyers for the Juliana case note that it has inspired other cases, like one in South Korea, where the Constitutional Court this year declared a provision of the country’s climate law unconstitutional, a milestone in climate litigation in Asia.   

“This declaration of youths’ rights and the government’s wrongs is a testament to the leadership of youth plaintiffs and their relentless advocacy for a safe and livable future, and of another judiciary doing its job,” said Julia Olson, co-executive director and chief legal counsel with Our Children’s Trust, a U.S. non-profit behind the Juliana case. “We hope it serves as a clarion call for U.S. courts to follow suit.”  

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Yet these workhorses of our vertical transportation systems – Americans make 20 billion elevator trips per year – are anything but generic. Indeed, the extraordinarily elaborate industrial and regulatory structure baked into the ordinary elevator plays an outsized role in explaining one of the more perplexing riddles of the built form of global cities, which is this: why do North American cities produce far more tall-and-sprawl development, whereas urban regions in other parts of the world typically feature extensive tracts of mid-rise buildings that beget denser and more sustainable neighbourhoods?

The answer, or at least a significant part of it, can be found in an eye-opening May 2024 deep dive on the state of the global elevator sector, published by a Brooklyn think tank called the Center for Building in North America. Written by its executive director, Stephen Smith, the report unpacks why North American elevators are on average three times more costly than their European counterparts – a price divergence that has enormous implications for built form. The United States and Canada also have fewer elevators per capita than any other high-income country.

“High-income countries with strong [labour] movements and high safety standards from South Korea to Switzerland have found ways to install wheelchair-accessible elevators in mid-rise apartment buildings for around $50,000 each, even after adjusting for America’s typically higher general price levels,” the report finds. “In the United States and Canada, on the other hand, these installations start at around $150,000 in even low-cost areas.”

The elevator question has taken on much more salience in the past few years as big cities across North America juggle severe housing shortages and sustainability-driven efforts to intensify residential neighbourhoods by allowing multiplexes and low-rise apartment buildings amidst huge swaths of detached houses. While some cities – such as Seattle and New York – still permit the construction of walk-ups without elevators, such dwellings limit accessibility for people with disabilities, seniors and young parents. What’s more, the high cost of North American elevators has made retrofitting those older buildings financially unfeasible – a problem older apartments in Europe do not face.

Smith’s study shows that North America has hewed to a largely outdated form of elevator regulation, whereas the rest of the world in the late 2000s adopted a far more flexible European technical standard that allows builders to install or retrofit elevators in low- and mid-rise buildings far more easily and inexpensively than is the case in the U.S. and Canada.

In Canada and the U.S., the average number of apartments served by a single elevator now exceeds 100. In Europe, the ratio is far lower, at about 30, at least in part because most European jurisdictions allow the construction of “point access block” apartment buildings, which are configured around a single winding staircase and tend to be lower and squatter. Smith points out that even in very small multi-family buildings in much of Europe, with only one or two dozen units, it’s not unusual to have multiple elevators.

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Smith himself became acutely aware of elevator access issues not long after buying a fifth-floor condo apartment in a newly built Brooklyn walk-up in 2017. He chose the building because of the low monthly maintenance fees. “I was an in-shape 32-year-old and had only ever lived in walk-ups in New York,” he wrote. “An elevator just seemed like an unnecessary cost.”

Yet soon after he took possession, Smith contracted a viral infection that produced a debilitating constellation of symptoms, including dizziness, extreme fatigue and nerve damage. Cycling became treacherous, and the climb up to his apartment turned into an arduous trek.

At the time, Smith was tuning in to the surge of interest among American urbanists and small builders in early efforts to increase density in cities like Minneapolis, whose council in 2018 made triplexes legal anywhere in the city and abolished parking requirements. Contractors responded, but often with low-rise apartments that lacked elevators. Yet through friends and relatives in places like Romania and Italy, Smith knew that in those jurisdictions, small-scale apartments routinely came fitted out with lifts.

Besides the yawning gap between the technical standards in North America and the rest of the world, Smith’s investigation uncovered a range of other factors that drive up costs in Canada and the U.S. These include chronic shortages of skilled workers who can build and maintain elevators and restrictive provisions in collective agreements between the major manufacturers – such as Otis and Thyssen – and the elevator trades. Case in point: while the manufacturers increasingly want to move production offshore and ship pre-assembled elevator components, contracts allow unionized workers to actually disassemble pre-assembled parts and then rebuild them on site, a measure meant to eliminate production efficiencies that could reduce jobs.

Regulations, especially around accessibility, also play a perverse role. North American rules specify minimum cab sizes to allow for turning radii for wheelchairs and stretchers. The result, overall, is fewer elevators and thus less accessibility, Smith found.

Finally, the technical specs in North America are less flexible and more complicated, and Smith argues that there’s a linear relationship between that complexity and cost. The cost helps drive development choices: builders want to go higher to recoup those investments, and consequently the elevators serve more people, receive more wear and tear, and are therefore down far more frequently. In high-density urban cores, like Toronto’s downtown, the results are elevator peak periods and lineups to get out the door.

Smith’s recommendations include a call for North American regulators to consider the high-level implications of ratcheting up safety and accessibility standards, which, evidence suggests, ends up leading to fewer elevators or elevator-accessible apartment buildings.

The report’s primary recommendation, however, is philosophical: North American regulators and standards-setting entities should seek to take a more international outlook, borrowing from what’s worked fine in most of the rest of the world. “In the absence of strong data on the inadequacy of international practices, deference should be given to what is tried and true in societies with far more – and far more affordable – elevators than North America,” the report says.

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Like many in the environmental movement, I long thought of political conservatives as a nemesis for the environment. I came by this association honestly: from my grandfather, who co-founded the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, the predecessor to the left-leaning NDP, to my mother, who once told me that if we elected the Progressive Conservatives in the 1988 federal election, they would chop down all our trees. 

Later, however, after I co-founded Corporate Knights magazine and launched a survey, asking leading environmentalists who had been the greenest Canadian prime minister and U.S. president in history, I was surprised that on both counts, conservative leaders won the green star: Brian Mulroney and Theodore Roosevelt. I remember how moved Mulroney was, when I contacted him to inform him of this recognition from what were normally hostile quarters (reportedly, he considered his “Greenest Prime Minister in Canadian History” award as his most cherished honorific). I was also moved by how prominent environmentalists, including David Suzuki and Elizabeth May, took to the airwaves when Mulroney was crowned the greenest PM, free of any enmity for him, to celebrate the genuinely good things he had done on acid rain and for the ozone layer. It was a nice example of love triumphing over hate.

If there is one thing we know, it is that the environment cannot be a political football. It has to be a trans-partisan issue in which every party and leader can imagine themselves as heroes, especially now in these times that require heroic and sustained climate action.

My old boss Ralph Nader formed the Critical Mass Energy Project in 1974 as a national anti-nuclear umbrella group, which was largely successful in stopping the expansion of nuclear power. Many environmentalists oppose nuclear energy because of the radioactive waste that sticks around for thousands of years. I was always skeptical about nuclear power because of the high costs (due in part to a web of regulatory requirements), but I was also rankled by how the nuclear lobby dismissed renewables. While I still don’t think building new nuclear is the way to go (it takes too long and costs too much), I am in favour of extending and keeping existing emissions-free nuclear online (see Eugene Ellmen’s exploration of the topic).

Many people were involved in the creation of Canada’s carbon tax, including myself. I co-authored a $100-billion carbon tax plan in 2007 launched alongside members of Parliament from three of Canada’s four national parties (guess who was missing), which almost immediately inspired John Baird, then the Conservative environment minister, to coin the attack line “a tax on everything.” Later, at a meeting of decision-makers in Winnipeg, I put forward the idea for a made-in-Canada carbon tax where the money stayed in the provinces, which was welcomed by Gerald Butts, the future principal secretary to the current Liberal prime minister, as “bad policy but good politics” and in 2018 became the law of the land.

Unfortunately, the carbon tax (as our director of research notes) is tailor-made for dividing people, which certain politicians (not just conservative) have gone to town on. And many of the biggest polluters managed to insert fine print that exempted them from paying much at all. It’s little wonder that many big polluters, from Exxon to Suncor, supported a carbon tax, and environmentalists were slow to appreciate this. Although it seemed like a wonderful idea to many political stripes at the time, the love affair with the carbon tax has not panned out, partly because it is individualist and punitive in nature and does not tap into the cooperative “build it together” spirit that is required to lay out the solutions to power a climate-friendly civilization. 

Not all shibboleths are long-held. Some are being formed as we speak, as the meat-industry lobby foments the belief that plant-based foods are too processed and expensive to be an effective climate solution. More on that in our “plant power” package.

For the sake of the planet, it’s time for all of us to shed the shibboleths that no longer serve the higher good, to come together in protecting the only home we have from spiralling into climate chaos. 

Rather than ostracizing, demonizing or lionizing, the path forward for climate action can be more inclusive, open-minded and clear-eyed, but focused on the practical nuts and bolts and love of the future we can build together.

Toby Heaps is the co-founder and publisher of Corporate Knights.

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But a decarbonization plan now taking shape in Australia points the way for government financing to help electrify day-to-day energy use for every household, regardless of income, save $1 trillion over an 18-year span, and fight inflation into the bargain, inventor and author Saul Griffith told an Ask Me Anything session hosted by Canada’s Transition Accelerator.

“In multiple really big ways, electrification can truly be anti-inflationary,” since it holds energy costs steady for 20 years once clean energy devices have been installed, said Griffith, founder of Rewiring America and Rewiring Australia. While artificially low fossil fuel prices are slowing down the shift in places like Canada and the United States, “some countries have already crossed the threshold where you literally can’t spend money fast enough because it saves the country so much.”

Transition Accelerator Vice-President Moe Kabbara said his organization is doing similar analysis for Canada. “It really depends on your baseline fuel costs,” he told Griffin. But in provinces or regions where fossil energy is expensive, “it’s really a no-brainer to go from heating oil to electricity.”

But to get that transition done, Canada will have to pick up the pace. Based on annual sales as a percentage of all home energy devices sold, cumulative installed capacity, and the “S-curve” that would herald rapid adoption, Kabbara said Canadians looking for home energy systems would have to buy nothing but heat pumps and heat pump water heaters by 2035 to completely change out the equipment stock by mid-century.

Other countries face the same challenge, and “that’s humbling, because it’s really fast,” Griffith said. But past adoption curves for everything from flush toilets to televisions sets show that it isn’t impossible.

It’s Already Happening

“The good news is that it really is happening in most countries,” he said. “No matter where you are, the adoptions [of new technology] are increasing, the rate of increase is increasing,” and the overall trajectory matters more than some of the temporary downturns receiving attention in recent news reports.

One obstacle, Griffith added, is the $300 trillion in future profits the fossil fuel industry has at stake if a rapid decarbonization effort succeeds. “$300 trillion is a lot of motivation to play naughty in the media sphere with misinformation, and to try to slow this down with regulation,” he said. But “globally, these trends are going in the right direction.”

Griffith said Rewiring Australia has drafted a plan that builds on the widespread adoption and low cost of rooftop solar—at 3¢ to 4¢ per kilowatt-hour, it’s “almost 10 times cheaper” than the most expensive fossil alternative, putting the country at a tipping point for rapid adoption.

In multiple really big ways, electrification can truly be anti-inflationary.

 

– Saul Griffith, inventor and author

While the U.S. Inflation Reduction Act was one inspiration for the Australian policy, the White House plan relies on tax credits that aren’t useful to many of the households that need them most. So Rewiring Australia came up with a plan “where government becomes the financial backstop for every household, regardless of income,” to shift from fossil fuels to electricity.

The proposal “is being taken very seriously,” he told participants, not least because a $1-billion investment in cars, water heaters, space heating, and kitchen hobs (stovetops) would save the economy $1 trillion in energy costs through 2040.

With fossil fuels, “you buy a cheap machine up front, but then you pay for expensive fuels for a long time into the future, and [the prices of] those fuels are volatile” due to external events ranging from the COVID-19 pandemic to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. “The interesting thing about electrification is that you buy a slightly more expensive machine up front, but then you’re feeding it very cheap and very consistently-priced electricity in the future.”

Australians have already seen their household energy costs rise from $2,000 some years ago to $7,000 in 2023. But “if you electrify the vehicles, put up rooftop solar and a battery to cover about half of the electricity, which is easy, electrify heating and cooking, the ongoing energy cost is about $2,000 per year, and that cost is fixed for 20 years into the future.”

That’s what makes electrification anti-inflationary compared to volatile fossil fuel costs that “will continue to rise and rise,” he explained. “I don’t think the world’s economists get this, and as a physicist, I can’t guess why.”

‘Raise Your Daughter to Be An Electrician’

A participant asked Griffith what skills and expertise the energy transition will demand, and what he says to young people who see a scary future ahead.

“I understand the temptation for younger people to be a little bit negative. They’ve been handed a pretty tough basket,” he replied. “But we can now prescriptively say this is what we need to do. We need more engineers, because hardware is back. Everyone wants to go and write AI, but we need those old school skills like chemicals and metallurgy and electrical engineering and electronics,” so “there’s a huge amount of job security for anyone who wants to go into those areas.”

But trades training will be even more important. The professional engineering track is “a nice story for the high end of town,” Griffiths said. “But really, the heavy lifting in this transition is at the technician level. It’s the jobs that all countries ignored over the last four decades to their peril, good tradespeople jobs.”

Everyone wants to go and write AI, but we need those old school skills like chemicals and metallurgy and electrical engineering and electronics.

 

– Saul Griffith, inventor and author

A major problem right now, in Australia as well as Canada, is that installers who are familiar with gas appliances are selling against electrical upgrades when homeowners are in the market for new equipment. “We have to turn those people into the sales force, and that happens by really recognizing that that’s who’s going to get this done, that by far the majority of the jobs created will be in all of these skilled trade installations for all of this kit.”

In another parallel for a Canadian audience, he said Australia is still in the midst of a culture war where many contractors and tradespeople are skeptical about electrification and question whether it will create jobs. Rewiring Australia is trying to make the case by “increasing the cultural value of the actual work force that’s going to get this job done,” positioning skilled trades as the real heroes and “giving them the central role in this societal transition, rather than just being the person who shows up to install the thing.”

So for students and younger workers, “yes, if you’re about to graduate from a nice university, please go into engineering, or at least go into policy-making to make better policy,” Griffith said. “But even more important, raise your daughters to be electricians and contractors.”

This story first appeared on The Energy Mix. Read the original article here. 

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You follow the money, of course. With the right financial data, the clean economy comes in clear – and the numbers show that it’s developing momentum.

Released by Corporate Knights and California-based shareholder advocates As You Sow on February 15, the 11th Clean200 ranking captures the green transition in full flight, cataloguing those public companies that are earning the most from sustainable sources. Crucially, it also signals to investors – venture capitalists, institutions and individuals alike – that a wide range of companies are capitalizing on new-economy principles without sacrificing annual returns or opportunities for growth.

Between July 1, 2016, and January 15, 2024, Clean200 companies generated a total return of 103.5%. Although they underperformed the MSCI ACWI broad market index, which grew 114.4%, the Clean200 trounced the key index of global fossil fuel companies (the MSCI ACWI/Energy Index), which gained only 64.5% through those years.

And that’s the big deal, says As You Sow CEO Andrew Behar, who co-authored the 2024 study. “In 2016, we created the Clean200 in response to investors saying, ‘If we divest fossil fuels, there is nothing to invest in.’” Eight years later, the message is clear: “Investors who are not tilting their portfolios toward a clean future do so at their own peril.”

Companies from 35 countries made the list this year. In first place again is Apple, with sustainable revenues of US$275 billion – representing 70% of the computer maker’s total revenues of $394 billion. Other blue-chip names on the list include Tesla (number three), HP (five), Microsoft (six), Daimler (12), BMW (16), Nissan (36), Nike (50), Swatch (157) and even the iconic U.S. Steel (177) – which recently committed to being zero-carbon by 2050.

“Our mission is to shine a light on the heroes of the battle against climate change,” notes report co-author Toby Heaps, CEO of Corporate Knights. “The 2024 Clean200 proves there are true sustainability champions out there. The key is to rigorously apply a scientifically inspired method to identify these gems.”

In total, Clean200 companies earned more than $2.2 trillion in sustainable revenue in 2022, deriving on average 54.7% of their revenues from sustainable business activities, versus 13.6% for their MSCI ACWI peers. Researchers calculated company revenues using the Corporate Knights Sustainable Revenue database, which identifies the percentage of sales firms earn from sustainable economy themes such as renewable power, electric vehicles, plant protein and smart buildings. The ranking excludes firms involved in industries such as fossil fuels, deforestation, prisons, weapons and tobacco – as well as companies that engage in blocking climate policies.

Leading the pack is the U.S., with 39 companies making the list this year. Other blooming centres of corporate sustainability are China (23), Japan (18) and France (13), followed by Brazil, Canada and Germany with 10 companies each.

The Canadian firms on the list span an intriguing range of industries: engineering giants WSP Global (113) and Stantec (181), environmental service firms GFL Environmental (122) and Waste Connections (151), telecoms BCE (127) and Telus (144), transportation titan Canadian National Railway (114), electronics manufacturer Celestica (141), packaging producer Cascades (168) and Ontario utility Hydro One (198).

More evidence that the future belongs to anyone who will put in the work.

METHODOLOGY

The Clean200 are the largest 200 public companies ranked by clean revenue. The ranking was first calculated on July 1, 2016, and publicly released on August 15, 2016, by Corporate Knights and As You Sow. The current list has been updated with data through January 15, 2024.

The Clean200 companies are ranked by their clean revenues in U.S. dollars. The data set is developed through assessment of a company’s revenue that aligns with the definitions laid out in the Corporate Knights Sustainable Economy Taxonomy, sourced from Corporate Knights research. To be eligible, a company must earn more than 10% of total revenues from clean sources.

The Clean200 uses negative screens. It excludes all oil and gas companies, all utilities that generate less than 50% of their power from green sources, the top 100 coal companies as measured by reserves, the top 100 oil and gas companies as measured by reserves, as well as all fossil fuel companies, majority fossil-fired utilities, pipeline and oil-field-services companies, and other fossil-fuel-related companies screened on As You Sow’s Fossil Free Funds. In addition, the Clean200 excludes weapons companies, including major military arms manufacturers found on the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute’s top 100 arms-producing and military-services list, as well as cluster munitions, nuclear weapons and civilian firearm manufacturers screened on As You Sow’s Weapon Free Funds. The Clean200 also excludes palm oil, paper/pulp, rubber, timber, cattle and soy producers that are screened on As You Sow’s Deforestation Free Funds; companies that use child or forced labour, are involved in the manufacture of harmful pesticides and that engage in negative climate lobbying are not included. The full list of exclusionary screens is provided below.

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We’re still building the global frameworks for companies to report their progress in greening their products and operations. But some early returns are coming in – and showing that trail-blazing companies do exist and are starting to change the world.

This fall, Corporate Knights and U.K.-based financial publication The Banker collaborated to produce the 2023 Sustainable Banking league table, the second annual ranking monitoring how global banks are helping finance the green transition. This year, the study wrested sustainability-based data out of 87 banks participating in the U.N.-organized Net Zero Banking Alliance (NZBA) – up from 60 last year.

The good news? In fiscal 2022, these banks earned a hefty US$53 billion in sustainable revenues from their loan books, investment portfolios and underwriting and advisory services.

Better still, these 87 banks posted a total outstanding sustainable loan book of nearly US$1.1 trillion, a 55% increase over 2021. Their underwriting of sustainable bonds and providing sustainable advisory services reached nearly US$1.5 trillion this year, up 144%.

Some of the increases in green financing stem from a growing willingness on the part of banks to disclose their sustainability-related details. But unlocking these trillion-dollar levels demonstrates just how much business is in the green economy – and should encourage more bankers to up their games.

In first place, for the second year in a row, is Vancouver-based Vancity, with a sustainable revenue ratio of 24.3%. The values-based co-op earns significant revenues from loan-support services that help high-emitting clients improve their emission measurement and reporting practices – demonstrating the new opportunities that leadership provides.

Asked to comment on the bank’s best-in-class performance, Jonathan Fowlie, the chief external relations officer who leads Vancity’s impact-strategy division, turned the focus on people and planet. “When a financial institution prioritizes sustainability, its impact resonates throughout the broader economy and helps to create a better future for us all.” He hopes other institutions will catch up soon: “There’s no time to delay our journey towards a more sustainable society.”

Runner-up this year is Germany’s ProCredit Holding, which serves small and medium-sized businesses mainly in eastern and southeastern Europe and in Ecuador. In its first year on the list, ProCredit earned a sustainability revenue score of 22.2% – just ahead of third-place Netherlands’ Triodos Bank. Triodos posted a sustainable ratio of 21.3%, based on its lending activity in sectors such as organic foods, renewable energy and environmental technologies.

The bad news is that trillions in financing are still going to oil and gas. In fact, in the seven years since the Paris climate agreement was signed, the 60 biggest banks in the world contributed US$5.5 trillion to the financing of fossil fuel projects, according to a report released earlier this year by the Rainforest Action Network. Fossil fuel financing is dominated by a handful of banks in the United States, Canada and Japan, the report notes, with RBC appearing for the first time as the leading financier to the industry, providing a whopping US$41 billion in 2022.

Another report, released in September by ActionAid, looked specifically at fossil fuel financing in the Global South and found that some $3.2 trillion has flowed to those operations since 2016.So where does RBC stand when it comes to financing sustainable solutions? It ranks middle of the pack, in 40th place, well behind rivals Vancity and BMO (22) – but ahead of National Bank (45), Scotiabank (46), TD (77) and CIBC (86).

“While we have seen significant increases in the size of the sustainable loans, when we compare these figures to the financing being provided to the fossil fuel industry by the 60 largest banks in the world, it is evident the industry has a long way to go,” says Matthew Malinsky, research manager at Corporate Knights. “Banks need to slash their fossil fuel financing and immediately abolish any funding to expansion projects, while continuing to increase their exposure to projects funding the transition to the low-carbon economy.”

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When wildfires encroached on  the outskirts of Fort McMurray the morning of May 3, 2016, the general messaging from officials was “Go about your life as normal.” By noon, as John Vaillant reports in his book Fire Weather: The Making of a Beast, the tune had changed dramatically, to “Everyone out! Now!!” Eighty-eight thousand people fled the city, many carrying traumas that last to this day. Roughly 2,400 homes were destroyed, many in an explosive burst of incinerated fury, because the heat was so extreme. By the time the fire expired 15 months later, it had consumed 5,900 square kilometres of forest and caused $9.9 billion in damage. They called it The Beast. 

Fire in the forest is normal; the boreal forest has evolved to burn every hundred years. Spruce fir trees actually wait for fire to release their seeds. But when you consider that eight of the world’s worst wildfire years have happened in the last 10 years, this certainly isn’t normal. This year there have been furiously destructive fires in British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Nova Scotia, Ontario, Quebec, Kazakhstan, Sicily, Sardinia, Lombardy, Athens, Corfu, Rhodes, France, Romania, Andalusia, Catalonia, Portugal, Arizona, California, Montana, Oregon, Maui (killing more than 100 people and destroying Lahaina), and now, as I write, Yellowknife. They are even burning in the Arctic.  

By early August, 5,500 fires had burned 134,000 square kilometres of Canada’s forests, six times more than the seasonal average, releasing a vast amount of stored carbon. That’s five times the size of Vermont, two and a half times the size of Nova Scotia. In northern B.C., the Donnie Creek fire is the largest ever recorded in the province. Canada has 3.2 million square kilometres of forest, so if this much was to burn every year, it would all be blackened and gone by 2047. All gone.  

The climate system is an angry beast, and we are poking at it with sticks.

 

– Wallace Broecker, oceanographer, paleoclimatologist, 50 years in climate science. 

The “beast” is both fire and the climate system. Each fire has a specific local cause, but if we continue to feed the climate beast, increasing the heat and drought conditions that fire thrives on, we can be guaranteed that future fires will be worse, as will the downpours, floods and sea-level rise that the beast also causes. In 2022, a landmark UN report warned that the climate crisis would increase the risk of wildfire by 50% by the end of the century. 

As humans, we like our creature comforts. We also like our beliefs, and we are reluctant to admit that we might sometimes be wrong. It’s a matter of pride. If we can persuade ourselves that there is no climate beast, we can continue to enjoy our trucks, our boats, our flights, our vacations, our steaks and our other fossil-fuelled privileges without a guilty conscience. To bolster our belief, we can listen to professors like Jordan Peterson, who will assure us and his millions of followers that any talk of a climate crisis is a hoax designed to take away our cherished personal freedoms. 

Meanwhile, the fire keeps coming, and a new word has entered our vocabulary: pyrocumulonimbus. This is fire weather that explodes like a bomb, cauterizing the landscape; devouring houses, cars, trucks and equipment; vaporizing any water that the valiant firefighters might try to send its way. 

In Fort McMurray, as Vaillant describes with aching pain in his book, 20,000 of the residents who fled chose not to return, but 68,000 did return to continue feeding the beast, many of them digging bitumen out of the ground, cooking it with two billion cubic feet of natural gas a day, to produce three million barrels of crude oil a day, pumping it into pipelines, all so that we can keep on driving and flying our fossil-fuelled vehicles.  

In a few short decades, we have burned our way through fossilized energy that took millions of years to form. We have released all of its stored carbon into the atmosphere, where, as carbon dioxide, it traps heat. As a New Scientist editorial stated in June 2023, “The basic science of climate change is so universally accepted that only the most fringe elements of society now deny it.”  

Yet like an alcoholic who insists they are not drunk, many people refuse to talk about it. In Alberta, 53% of those who cast a ballot in the 2023 election voted for the United Conservative Party, made up of politicians who are determined to continue feeding the beast.  

Last week, a cold front passed through the province following several days of hot, dry weather. pic.twitter.com/fHbPsizjbr

— BC Wildfire Service (@BCGovFireInfo) August 22, 2023

It’s not just in Canada that people are having this difficulty. In the summer of 2021, the novelist Christy Lefteri flew to a small town on the coast of Greece near Athens to learn about the wildfire that ripped through the town in 2018, killing 80 people and destroying two– thirds of the homes. She wanted to hear people’s stories, to understand what it meant to be displaced by such a disaster. Everyone was distressed, but as soon as she raised the topic of climate change, they made it clear that such talk was “shut down immediately and completely.” 

In Lahaina, the historic town in Maui destroyed by an unprecedented blaze, the talk is of drought, hurricane winds, downed power lines, highly flammable non-native grasses, and the absence of warning sirens. After all, how can the myriad climate solutions help the victims of a fire that has come and gone? Far better to focus on prevention by protecting the wildland-urban-interface, fire-proofing people’s homes, and better training for firefighters to limit the damage from the fire beast’s assaults. We have our firefighter and first responder heroes, and our climate heroes are legion, but their efforts are being sabotaged, obstructed, and delayed by those who are addicted.  

If we continue to obstruct the climate solutions that can wean us off our addiction and lead us to a green, climate-safe future, the beast will destroy us all. It will burn our forests down, drive us off our farms, flood our homes, increase our torment with its heat, turn us into climate refugees, slowly cook the ocean and make our grandchildren curse us. Then it will melt the ice in Greenland and Antarctica and flood the world far beyond what anyone is expecting.  

So please don’t think “I’m glad it’s not my family that was living in Fort McMurray, Lytton, or Lahaina.” The beast will come for all of us. Ask instead how you can be one of the heroes who goes out to fight the climate beast. There is much that you can do: 

Have you: 

• written to your local, federal and provincial politicians, urging rapid action? 
• examined your investments and removed all those that support fossil fuels? 
• written to the directors of your bank, urging them to stop financing fossil fuels? 
• urged the companies you purchase from (and business friends in C-suites) to rapidly curb their emissions? 
• traded in your beast-mobile for an EV, bus or bicycle? 
• switched your home’s oil or gas heating to a clean electric heat pump? 
• held your children tight, and told them you will do whatever you can to stop the beast? 

Guy Dauncey lives in Ladysmith, on Vancouver Island. He is the co-founder of the West Coast Climate Action Network. 

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