What had begun as a protest against a 1,900-kilometre oil pipeline skirting Standing Rock Sioux territory and potentially threatening the tribe’s primary water source had turned into an epic battle over Indigenous rights, which resonated far and wide. Members of some 300 Indigenous nations travelled to the Standing Rock Indian Reservation in North Dakota for the Indigenous-led protest against the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL). As water protectors conducted ceremonies on the banks of the Missouri River, largely peaceful demonstrations were punctuated by violent confrontations, with law enforcement using tear gas, rubber bullets, tasers and other militarized equipment to crack down on protesters. 

It was one of the most potent examples of the intersection between the climate, Indigenous and anti-capitalist movements on the continent. After the months-long standoff came to a close, with oil starting to flow, pipeline owner Energy Transfer LP set out to make an example of the opposition. In 2017, it sued a smattering of environmental groups, including Greenpeace International and its entities in the United States, under anti-racketeering laws, accusing them of misinformation and hindering the company’s profits. A judge dismissed that case in 2019. One week later, Energy Transfer took aim again at the high-profile climate crusaders by accusing them of defamation, “militant direct action” and “incit[ing]” protests by spreading misinformation, even though Greenpeace’s lawyers say the organization played only a minor peaceful role in the protests.

That second lawsuit came to a dramatic head in March 2025, when a jury took the oil company’s side, ordering Greenpeace International and subsidiaries to pay an unprecedented US$669 million in damages to the oil giant (which made US$4.1 billion in revenue last quarter) in a decision that was shocking for its scale and the message that it sent. Greenpeace has appealed the decision, with a raft of human rights and environmental groups dubbing it an “unfair trial” tainted by “flagrant” due process violations and posing “irreparable harm” to free speech, not to mention Indigenous sovereignty. “Energy Transfer’s false and self-serving narrative that Greenpeace manipulated Standing Rock into protesting DAPL is patronizing and disrespectful to our people,” Janet Alkire, chairwoman of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, wrote in a statement following the decision. 

For Steven Donziger, the proceedings sounded all too familiar. In court, Energy Transfer “became the good guys who had been quote-unquote victimized by the very tribe whose culture, lands and burial sites were being destroyed by these pipelines,” says Donziger, a famed environmental lawyer who sat in on the trial as part of an independent monitoring group. 

Donziger has been locked for years in a legal battle with Chevron, which was found guilty of illegally dumping toxic oil waste in Indigenous ancestral lands in the Ecuadorian rainforest in 2011. “I’ve been dealing with attacks on me from Chevron for 15 years,” Donziger says. “It’s pretty much baked into my professional life.” Donziger spent 993 days under house arrest and then in jail in the United States for refusing to hand over his cellphone in a lawsuit that Chevron launched against him and other members of the case following the Ecuador judgment. 

Like Energy Transfer, he says, Chevron cast itself as the victim, resorting to what legal experts call a “strategic lawsuit against public participation” (SLAPP) to intimidate and silence critics. EarthRights found 152 cases between 2012 and 2022 in which the fossil fuel industry had resorted to SLAPPs and other tactics in the United States to curb dissent. Europe, while generally less tolerant of these sorts of lawsuits, has seen their numbers climb, with 166 cases initiated in 2023. The most common driver was corruption, followed by environmental issues, according to the Coalition Against SLAPPs in Europe. Prior to the North Dakota ruling, Greenpeace launched a lawsuit in the Netherlands under the European Union’s new anti-SLAPP directive, seeking to recoup the costs incurred by Energy Transfer’s back-to-back lawsuits in the United States. 

“What happened to Greenpeace, to me, is the culmination of years of work by the fossil fuel industry and other elements of the corporate sector in the United States and Canada to silence opposition to oil and gas development,” Donziger says. “This is not new. But it is an intensification.” He calls it “the ultimate existential showdown” – one that pits the fossil fuel industry’s eye-popping profits against the survival of the planet. “As the climate movement grows stronger, the industry gets more desperate – and spends more money to manipulate the legal system.” 

What happened to Greenpeace is the culmination of years of work by the fossil fuel industry . . .
to silence opposition to oil and gas development.

— Steven Donziger, environmental lawyer

It has all been “turbocharged” by the Trump administration and a political environment that Donziger says “favours the aggressor and disfavours those who rely on the first amendment” on free speech. Within days of his inauguration, Trump slashed environmental regulations and withdrew commitments to reduce emissions, alongside a presidential mandate to “unleash American energy” by pumping up fossil fuel extraction and exports. The administration scrubbed references to climate change from federal websites and fired scores of scientists in its cutbacks, including 400 who were working on a major congressionally mandated climate report that would detail the impacts of climate change in the United States. In April, Lee Zeldin, Trump’s head of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), crowed that a suite of reforms that curtailed restrictions on pollution from cars, trucks and power plants was a “dagger to the heart of the climate religion.” 

Gutting funding for environmental advocates is a more subtle form of destabilizing the movement. In one of his first acts as president, Trump froze funding for the Inflation Reduction Act, the largest single piece of climate legislation in U.S. history, which included a raft of incentives for renewable energy. A court has since ordered the administration to resume funding. In the meantime, the 2026 budget includes deep cuts to climate and science funding, including a 54% cut – or US$5 billion – to the EPA and the elimination of more than $15 billion in what it calls “Green New Scam funds.”

“Grassroots work, unfortunately, isn’t for the fearful,” says Asti Robins, director of climate justice at the Power Coalition for Equity and Justice, a Louisiana-based group of community organizations, which has seen clean energy projects shuttered as federal grants are revoked. The Power Coalition is among a number of groups that raised the spectre of audits as another tool in the Trump arsenal against climate groups, with reports surfacing that groups were being asked to turn over correspondence with the EPA along with the paper trail of how they were spending money, articles of incorporation and policies. There were also worries that the president would target green groups’ tax-exempt status, but as of April the move had not occurred. Beyond the economic attacks, there has been the broader “anti-woke” attack on all things DEI – diversity, equity and inclusion – which is also a crucial part of the climate movement today. Environmental justice groups that focus on racialized communities – both in terms of the climate impact they face and ensuring that their priorities are considered in the energy transition – are reeling. 

“Under this administration there’s been a closing of all environmental justice offices in government agencies,” Robins laments. “To know the leaps and bounds we’ve made in the last 10 years – of even being recognized on the stage as an actual part of the environmental movement, which has historically been white-led,” she says, only to have it stripped away through attacks on DEI initiatives, has been deeply demoralizing. “I feel like we’re going backwards.”  

Life-or-death stakes

Curbing dissent in the green space is neither new nor exclusive to the United States. Human rights groups have documented the years-long campaign in Canada to criminalize Indigenous Wet’suwet’en land defenders who opposed the construction of the Coastal GasLink pipeline that would carry natural gas through their unceded ancestral territory in British Columbia. With the court on their side, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police carried out multiple raids between 2019 and 2023 to remove protesters from a road blocking the construction of the pipeline, which was completed last year. 

Latin America is a particularly perilous location to be an environmental land defender. The latest report from Global Witness, a non-governmental group that tracks such attacks, found that 85% of the 196 land and environmental defenders who were murdered in 2023 were in Latin America. Of those, some 43% were Indigenous and 12% were women. Mining is the biggest industry driver of the attacks, according to the study, which found that 25 land defenders were killed opposing mining projects. One recent case involves Julia Chuñir, a Mapuche woman who had been living in a contested piece of forested land in the Chilean Patagonia region as a way to protect it from deforestation. She disappeared without a trace in late 2024. 

No matter what they want me to call this work, I’m still going to be doing it.

—Asti Robins, climate justice director, Power Coalition for Equity and Justice

Whatever shape the crackdown on dissent takes, the stakes appear ever higher, as communities continue to advocate, in some cases around issues that mean life or death. 

The Power Coalition, for example, has been trying to relocate students who attend a school that is dangerously close to a carcinogen-emitting factory in St. James Parish, Louisiana. In another project, the organization had received government funding to help communities craft local benefit agreements for hosting new carbon-capture projects. That grant was cancelled by the Trump administration. It’s one example of the kind of funding rollbacks that threaten the ability of small organizations to build capacity. In the face of this onslaught, Robins remains resolute, echoing the sentiments emanating from Greenpeace and other climate organizations that are regrouping. 

“No matter what they want me to call this work, I’m still going to be doing it,” Robins says. “We have to stand with community and what they demand.”

Natalie Alcoba is a Buenos Aires–based journalist and senior editor at Corporate Knights.

The post The new era of policing green dissent appeared first on Corporate Knights.

But the intense backlash directed at JSO is not evidence that its campaign faltered. It is a sign that these activists succeeded in emotionally charging the public debate about climate change. They gave the public something to argue about, react to, even mock – and in doing so, made the climate crisis impossible to ignore.

The alternative, an apathetic consensus, would entail passively accepting the dominant approach to address the climate crisis. That means market-based solutions, a faith in technological innovation and incremental policy reforms within existing political and economic systems. These have arguably so far failed, as global temperatures continue to skyrocket.

Movements that are easy to ignore tend to be forgotten. Just Stop Oil made itself, and its cause, impossible to ignore.

Through my own research on climate activism, I have studied how environmental protest influences policy, corporate behaviour and financial markets. Activists can stimulate change, but not through rational arguments alone. Change happens by making an emotional splash. It creates antagonism, dissent and tension, which are all needed to enliven public debate. Emotions including anger, fear and guilt play a key role in the ability of activists to create moral urgency and force issues into the spotlight.

JSO harnessed this emotional logic not only from supporters, but from critics. Those who dragged protesters off roads, raged in comment sections and professed their hate toward the group were reacting because the group had emotionally triggered them. Like a person who gets under your skin, JSO became very hard to ignore.

The post The legacy of Just Stop Oil is that disruptive tactics work appeared first on Corporate Knights.

Five environmental groups and one farmer’s union are working together to dissuade Health Canada from approving a new systemic pesticide that could prove harmful to bees, birds, small mammals and other organisms. The pesticide, called flupyradifurone, attacks the nervous systems of insects and has the potential to contaminate pollen, fruits and seeds of plants. Bees and other pollinators, for one, are already having a hard time coping with the effects of neonicotinoids, which is widely believed to be a major cause of mass bee die-offs. “Scientists have called for a global phase-out of neonics. The last thing we need is another systemic pesticide contaminating the environment,” said Karen Eatwell, a spokesperson for the National Farmers Union. Health Canada has initiated a public comment period on its proposed approval of the new pesticide, says the group, which includes the Sierra Club Canada Foundation and the David Suzuki Foundation. Comments are being received up to November 3.

32 countries at “extreme” risk of conflict

An analysis of 198 countries has identified 32 nations that are most likely to experience conflict and civil unrest as a result of climate change. Bangladesh was found to be the most at-risk country in the world, followed by Sierra Leone, South Sudan, Nigeria and Chad, as well as island nations the Philippines and Haiti. Perhaps even more alarming is that growth economies like Cambodia, India and Pakistan are also on the “extreme risk” list, raising an important question about how much climate change could destabilize our increasingly globalized economy. Maplecroft, the analytics company that produced the report, said that one unifying characteristic of all these economies is their heavy dependence on agriculture for job creation and growth. “Changing weather patterns are already impacting food production, poverty, migration and social stability – factors that significantly increase the risk of conflicts and instability in fragile and emerging states alike.”

85,000 buildings in NYC flood zones: Report

You can bet insurance companies are taking note of this one. A policy brief released this week from the Office of the New York City Comptroller has determined that 84,596 buildings and 400,000 residents in NYC now lie within the so-called 100-year flood plain thanks to the rising effects climate change. The building count more than triples the previous estimate from 2010 and represents property value of nearly $130 billion, according to the analysis. The new estimate came about because of the $14 billion in devastation caused two years ago by Hurricane Sandy. “With such immense value arrayed along the city’s coast, we must act now to make the necessary investments to protect our homes, our businesses and our neighborhoods from the future effects of climate change and the potentially destructive force of another hurricane,” the brief states. “While the costs of resiliency projects are high, investing in the city’s future will pay enormous dividends, both to our waterfront communities and our broader economy.” The brief follows a report from the Union of Concerned Scientists that urges eastern and Gulf coast communities to prepare for chronic flooding over the next 15 and 30 years. To assist with adaptation, New Jersey just launched its Energy Resilience Bank, also in response to Hurricane Sandy. The bank will spend $200 million (U.S.) toward development of distributed energy resources at critical facilities so they can stay operational during outages caused by extreme weather. As Corporate Knights’ Ashley Renders reported today, Canada isn’t immune to the expected rise in flooding events. Unfortunately, it is the only country in the G8 without overland flood insurance.

Climate depression… It’s real

If all of this news about flooding and conflict is getting you down, you’re not alone. Madeleine Thomas at Grist.org wrote an insightful piece this week pointing to the struggle some climate scientists, environmentalists, and other “frontliners” are having with anxiety and depression as a result of climate research. “From depression to substance abuse to suicide and post-traumatic stress disorder, growing bodies of research in the relatively new field of psychology of global warming suggest that climate change will take a pretty heavy toll on the human psyche as storms become more destructive and droughts more prolonged,” wrote Thomas. “For your everyday environmentalist, the emotional stress suffered by a rapidly changing Earth can result in some pretty substantial anxieties.” Corporate Knights had a story on this important but underreported issue in our Summer 2014 magazine. Two years earlier, we ran a feature looking at the impacts of climate change on the mental health of employees working at companies perceived to be contributing to or solving the problem.

Tall travellers of the world unite!

The problem tall people have sitting in airplane seats isn’t really comparable to climate change, but it can cause considerable stress and discomfort – particularly for long flights, and when the person sitting in front insists on permanently reclining their own seat. As The Economist’s business travel blog wrote this week, “Spending three hours wedged into a seat that cannot physically accommodate your legs may not technically qualify as medieval torture, but it’s a close call.” The blog points to the fact that many airlines now accommodate extra-large – that is, heavier – passengers by finding them a complimentary second seat that allows them to spread out. So, it asks, why not adopt the same policy, official or otherwise, for tall people? It’s a reasonable suggestion, and such a call for civility would only be fair. After all, tall travellers have a proud history of helping their shorter peers get their luggage into and out of overhead compartments. But as one of Corporate Knights’ Twitter followers replied, “KLM would go out of business” with such a policy. True, those Dutch folks are pretty tall. But we love them just the same.

The post Time to talk about the birds and the bees appeared first on Corporate Knights.

Last year students at the University of British Columbia voted 4-to-1 in favour of having their school divest from fossil fuels. Now, nearly 200 university faculty have thrown their support behind the students by signing a petition calling for divestment. “Some are concerned divestment might hurt the income UBC receives from the endowment, but this need not to be the case,” states an open letter. “There are many opportunities in the market for an endowment to make equivalent or better returns, and studies designed to measure the impact of divestment have found little or no impact on returns.” The university’s faculty association is expected to decide on Monday if it will hold a referendum on the matter. Specifically, the open letters calls for immediate suspension of future fossil-fuel investments and divestment of existing holdings within five years.

We need a market for water: Brookings paper

The Brookings Institution has released a discussion paper that argues for more use of market forces to reduce water shortages in the U.S. west, a problem that is worse than most originally thought. Indeed, NASA research recently reported that the Colorado River Basin – which supplies 40 million people in seven states – is getting sucked dry. Population and economic growth and water overuse are all contributing to a problem exacerbated by dry, low-rainfall conditions brought about by climate change. Resilience needs to be brought into the water systems, argues the paper. “Western states can take an immediate step to enable more-flexible use of water resources by allowing simple, short-term water transactions,” it states. “Water policy should allow someone who needs water to pay someone else to forgo her use of water or to invest in water conservation and, in return, to obtain access to the saved water.” It also argues that state and local governments have a responsibility to establish essential market institutions, such as water banks, “that can serve as brokers, clearinghouses, and facilitators of trade.”

Is “pharming” sustainable?

Corporate Knights editor Tyler Hamilton has a feature today on the risks and rewards of genetically modifying plants to produce vaccines and a range of other drugs, such as a recent treatment for Ebola-infected U.S. aid workers that was derived from tobacco plants. The approach is proving simpler and less expensive than traditional methods, which rely on complicated bioreactor vessels that grow bacteria and animal cell cultures. Using plants also speeds up the drug discovery and production process, and products created can be designed to be edible and stored without refrigeration – a big benefit for developing countries. But the long-term risks, such as cross-crop contamination and pollen exposure to humans, animals and insects, remains a big sticking point for environmentalists and food industry groups who urge caution. What do you think?

Europe does it: tightens noose on GHG emissions

The European Union has historically led the world on efforts to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, but that didn’t stop member country leaders from raising the bar on Friday. The EU did, in the end, agree to a climate change pact that obligates members to collectively cut GHG emissions by at least 40 per cent below 1990 levels by 2030. As of 2012, the EU cut its emissions by about 18 per cent. This means it will have to make similar progress over the next 15 years. It’s an ambitious goal, but some environmental groups were disappointed that specific national targets are not binding. Other targets include renewable energy having 27 per cent market share on a EU-wide basis and energy-efficiency improvements of 27 per cent – the latter optional. Germany and some others were lobbying for a 30 per cent target for both, but countries such as the U.K. and Poland resisted that push.

Beware fake awards

As a public service to Corporate Knights’ readers, many of them representatives of corporations and startups in the social innovation space, we would like to alert you to an e-mail going around promoting an event called the “2015 Social Innovation Awards.” The e-mail, sent by a person named Sarah Khara, who is identified as a director of the awards organization, outlines nine categories to which organizations can submit applications – with each submission costing $450. Corporate Knights does not know for sure if this award or organization is legitimate, but what we can say is that a Google search reveals no background information about the awards or Sarah Khara. The website supplied in the e-mail – www.socinnovationawards.com – looks well designed, but lacks crucial information about the contest, its history, Khara and other staff, who the judges are, and the judging process. Furthermore, the URL for the website was only created on October 20, and the New York City address given at the bottom of the promotional e-mail appears to not exist. For this reason, we urge all readers who receive this e-mail to proceed with caution. We e-mailed Khara requesting an explanation. We have not yet received a reply.

The post October 24, 2014 appeared first on Corporate Knights.

What’s in that stink?

SC Johnson, the Wisconsin-based maker of household cleaning and air freshening products, said Thursday it would start disclosing the fragrance ingredients in specific products in spring 2015. The company, like many in the industry, does disclose overall ingredients but has not previously tied those ingredients to particular products. It will begin this new disclosure initiative in the United States and Canada, then Europe, starting with air care products and expanding from there into other categories. It may be the right thing to do, but it’s also a reaction to main competitor Clorox, which announced in late September it would start product-specific ingredient disclosure. It’s a big shift for the industry, which has historically been extremely secretive about fragrance ingredients.

Control of dot-eco domain goes to Canada

Corporate Knights reported Thursday that ICANN, the world’s Internet domain regulatory body, has given control of the new “dot-eco” top-level domain to a small Vancouver-based company called Big Room, which in its application had the backing of a global coalition of more than 50 environmental organizations. It took Big Room seven years, and a short-lived battle with another applicant backed by former U.S. vice-president Al Gore, to convince the regulator it would give the dot-eco domain a higher social purpose. The company hopes to have its dot-eco name registry operating sometime next year.

CK launches workplace safety web series

Visit corporateknights.com throughout the rest of October to follow our just-launched workplace safety web series, starting with today’s in-depth piece by award-winning journalist John Lorinc. In his story, Lorinc identifies fundamental shifts in our economy that are making traditionally low-risk, “safe” jobs – such as part-time retail and hotel service positions – more dangerous. The series is a partnership with the Canadian Society of Safety Engineering and the Center for Safety and Health Sustainability. Over the coming three weeks, we’ll also look at which industries are best and worst at disclosing workplace safety data, as well as the challenge of making sure safety standards trickle down through the supply chain. Another question we’ll answer: Why are injury claims in Canada’s east falling faster than in the west? Finally, we’ll end with a report on Canada’s latest worker safety data.

California tops at preparing for climate change

A new online tool developed by the Georgetown Climate Center lets users easily find out which U.S. states are making the most progress with climate adaptation and which ones are lagging behind. And, perhaps to no one’s surprise, California has come out on top, followed by Massachusetts and New York, reports Grist.org. This is exactly how Corporate Knights scored the Top 3 states in its Green Provinces and States ranking, which we released this past June. The difference is that instead of focusing on climate adaption plans, CK’s ranking scored states and provinces on 10 key performance indicators across six categories – air and climate, water, nature, transportation, waste, energy and buildings. We also had a 10-point bonus system that rewarded jurisdictions for having certain environmental programs in place. What’s interesting – and sad – about the Georgetown ranking is that just 14 out of 50 states have a finalized climate plan.

Tesla Unveils Powerful Model D

For all you Elon Musk fans out there, we would be remiss to not mention the unveiling yesterday of Tesla Motors’ new Model D electric car, or officially called the P85D. Wired.com is calling it Tesla’s “most powerful car ever.” That’s assuming, of course, you consider 0 to 60 miles per hour in 3.2 seconds fast. The Model D – basically a sportier, turbo-boosted version of the Model S – will also have all-wheel drive and an autopilot feature. “Tesla is adding a radar that can see through fog and snow; a camera with image recognition capability to spot traffic signs and lights, as well as pedestrians; 360-degree ultrasonic sonar; and a system that combines all the data those produce with navigation, GPS, and real-time traffic systems,” according to Wired.com.

The post October 10, 2014 appeared first on Corporate Knights.

The mass protest comes one day after an estimated 400,000 people marched through Manhattan in New York City to demand that world leaders at tomorrow’s United Nation Climate Summit create a binding agreement to stop climate change.

While indigenous communities have been at the forefront of the climate movement since the beginning, this weekend’s protests placed the spotlight firmly on indigenous peoples and people of colour as the leaders of the movement.

While it may seem like yesterday’s march should be enough to get the point across that climate change is a serious issue, Flood Wall Street is attempting to literally disrupt business as usual and send a message to investors that their actions matter.

Accompanied by a several helicopters and a large contingent of police officers, thousands of protesters began moving from Battery Park at the lower tip of Manhattan towards Wall Street around 11:30 yesterday morning, eventually settling around the iconic bull statue in the heart of the financial district.

Ta’Kaya Blaney, a 13-year-old activist and singer from the Sliammon First Nations group in British Columbia, said she was risking arrest by sitting in the middle of Wall Street because she wants to demonstrate how to bring attention to the corruption and ongoing injustice within the economy.

Activists are using Flood Wall Street as an opportunity to popularize the conversation about how capitalism and climate change are related, says Clayton Thomas-Muller, an indigenous activist with Idle No More and Defenders of the Land. He says they are also attempting to send a message that if world leaders are not going to create legally binding mechanism with clear timeframes, then the people will.

The Peoples Climate March yesterday was led by a large contingent of indigenous peoples and people of colour. Indigenous groups have always been at the forefront of the climate movement through their fight to protect their land rights. But yesterday’s march showed that people are starting to realize that indigenous people are not merely involved, they are leading the way, says Thomas-Muller.

Indigenous communities have constitutionally protected rights in Canada, which is one areas of law where Prime Minister Stephen Harper has not been able to stack the cards in favour of the oil and gas industry, he said.

Other groups are now more dependent than ever on the leadership of indigenous groups to shut down the oil sands, he added.

Indigenous communities also have thousands of years of experience with organizing economies in ways that are conducive to life systems on earth, he said. This is a gift that indigenous communities bring to the climate movement.

“As hard as the struggle to adjust capitalist society may be, we will be on the right side of history because we voiced the truth. It’s not our truth, it’s the truth,” says Blaney.

The post Indigenous groups lead the way appeared first on Corporate Knights.

Corporate Knights recently caught up with Lynas during his recent visit to Toronto to speak with Ontario farmers. In a wide-ranging interview, he spoke of the anti-GMO movement, the ongoing battle over labelling requirements for GM foods, and some promising public-sector GM projects in the works.

CK: Tell us about your transformation from GMO opponent to supporter.

LYNAS: I was one of a large group of people involved in the early stages of the anti-GMO movement, but was certainly neither the most vocal nor the most effective. That being said, I’m really the only one that’s discovered science, to put it simplistically, and come out and talked about it. So I’m in a unique position of being somebody who’s publicly reversed their position on this – and that’s brought me a lot of attention, some of it welcome and some of it unwelcome.

CK: Why is it that many environmentalists place so much trust in science when it comes to climate change or loss of biodiversity, but these standards change once GM crops come up?

LYNAS: Anti-GMO people have been described as the climate skeptics of the left. Although that’s a simplification of the issue, it illustrates that what we’re talking about is a political issue. Climate skeptics (on the right) tend to be anti-big government. They’re against climate science because it will almost certainly require government intervention into the economy, while anti-GMO people are against the involvement of big corporations like Monsanto. They’re against biotechnology because it appears to only privilege big corporations. Now neither of these two positions is evidence-based, but the problem is that people find their information through the process of confirmation bias to justify pre-existing positions.

CK: Opponents of GMOs tend to focus on corporations like Monsanto being very litigious and protective of their seeds, at the expense of smaller farmers. Is that your thinking?

LYNAS: Monsanto did sue various farmers, and there have been numerous cause celebre like Percy Schmeiser. The question is, if all these GMO crops had blown into his field, how come they were in such neat rows? He clearly wanted to use the technology without paying for it. The reality is, if you contaminate someone’s property, you can’t sue them for property theft. The whole charge is absurd and wouldn’t stand up in court. Monsanto’s never taken out a case that’s alleged that, but that myth is persistent and still very powerful.

In hindsight, it’s clear that Monsanto should have refrained from suing anybody to avoid developing such an image problem. Even so, they felt the need to protect their intellectual property (IP) from farmers who wanted to save their seed and basically steal their IP. Farmers who use it have to sign an agreement that they won’t save the seed. It’s a biologically self-replicating technology.

Now if you’re concerned about IP and the patenting of crops, for me the logical corollary is to promote the development of GMOs in the public sector. I’ve been working with Cornell University, where I’m a visiting fellow, on a new project regarding Bt Brinjal, a GM eggplant that is pest-resistant in Bangladesh. Farmers there are currently spraying toxic insecticides without any kind of protection, often wearing nothing more than flip-flops. They spray it a hundred times a year during growing season, which leads to tens of thousands of poisonings annually. The GMO version would not need to be sprayed. It would be a vast improvement both environmentally and in terms of public health. The use of genetic modification, done in the public sector by a consortium of international and Bangladeshi scientists, has nothing to do with Monsanto.

I can’t say this enough: if you’re concerned about corporate monopolization, you don’t try and ban an entire technology in response. Back in the day, if you were concerned about Windows being a monopolistic approach to an operating system you didn’t try to ban all computers. What you want to do instead is to make the technology more available in the public sector, in a non-IP protected way, for the benefit of the poorer farmers. For me, that is way more interesting because there are so many applications, from golden rice to Brinjal, where GMOs can promote food security and the sustainability of agriculture.

CK: You mentioned golden rice. Can you discuss the controversy around it?

LYNAS: Golden rice is a single, targeted approach to tackling vitamin A deficiency, which kills two million or so children per year. Millions of families are dependent on rice for their staple food, so if there was beta-carotene in that rice it would reduce that deficiency and save a number of lives.

The opposition to golden rice is internationally supported. There’s this mentality in the west that promoting agro-ecological organic farming is the way to go for poorer countries, but the reality is that it confines farmers to a form of very low productivity farming. If they’re at subsistence level, they are currently struggling to feed themselves and their families. So you’re actually promoting food insecurity by externalizing the urban foodie biases of the modern world onto developing countries where they need to increase their productivity.

CK: Battles have sprung up in a number of individual states across the United States over proposals to mandate labelling on all food grown using GMOs. What’s your position on this?

LYNAS: This is where I get very critical of the biotech industry, because I think their strategies have been entirely counterproductive. Effectively spending millions of dollars trying to stop consumers from knowing where their products are being used is essentially the opposite of advertising. That’s tailor-made to make people feel scared about something, if it looks like there is an effort to cover up what the ingredients are in their food.

The way to dispel some of this mythology and fear mongering is to give people access to information. Opponents want a big GMO label because they want to stigmatize the product and get it off the shelves. They’re into prohibition, but there’s got to be some kind of middle road where we can actually give people the information that they want without the skull and crossbones stigmatization attached to it. You have to give people the option of finding out what’s in their food. Transparency should be the friend of science on this. If you don’t fill the void, the void will be filled by the conspiracy theorists. Let’s have farmers explain why they’re using GMO crops, and scientists demonstrate why they’re continuing to develop them. If you’re Monsanto and you want to explain why it’s beneficial for farmers to use this, you can if it’s labelled. You can’t if it’s hidden.

CK: What are the biggest barriers to the sort of open-source GMO research you’re advocating for?

LYNAS: Currently, it costs tens of millions of dollars in the United States to get through a regulatory system that is only applied to GMOs, but not any other form of crop breeding. In the U.S. and Europe, the only players that can navigate the system are the very biggest players, so the activists have created a situation where only corporations can afford to commercialize biotech crops. In the U.K. we’ve got Rothamsted Research and the John Innes Centre doing fantastic GM crop research. They’ve looked at aphid-resistant wheat, which wouldn’t need to be sprayed with agrochemicals. Can they get that through the European Union system? No way. So farmers are effectively banned from being able to access this technology. That’s the real stumbling block.

CK: Some GMO opponents have accused you of being an industry stooge. How do you respond to these accusations?

LYNAS: I’m a shill for science, I’m not a voice for hire. No one’s ever tried to buy me. It’s a classic ad hominem technique – if you can’t discredit someone’s argument then you try to discredit them personally.

CK: Some people have even drawn comparisons to Greenpeace activist turned industry consultant Patrick Moore…

LYNAS: For me, he’s a model of what to not end up as, because the only asset you have in my position is your independence, your credibility.

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Wicked problems of sustainability are complex and require the collaborative efforts of economic, environmental and social actors. Traditionally, coordination of such activities has come from political leaders, often at the national level, where policy levers can direct attention and behaviour for individuals and industry toward commonly held social and environmental goals.

Countries such as Sweden and Denmark have been recognized for their foregrounding of sustainability as part of their national agenda, where creating a sustainable society is a key country goal and well-being is defined in economic, social and environmental terms.

Canada has slipped significantly in recent years from its position on the world stage as a leader in environmental policy innovations. The creation of a Federal Sustainable Development Strategy, where all federal departments and agencies are required to set goals and targets and report on these in a three-year cycle, seemed to move in a promising direction, but has not resulted in any discernible progress to date. Political pundits routinely point to the unwillingness of the Canadian government to take a leadership role on key sustainability issues such as climate change, which has further eroded its international reputation in this domain.

This is not, in fact, an exclusively Canadian problem. The Rio+20 talks were heavily criticized for their inability to build clear momentum toward change, hampered by the hesitancy of most countries to stake out a leadership position on global issues of sustainability. In an era of austerity cuts and financial belt tightening it seems that national interests prevail over biosphere concerns, and economic priorities trump environmental and social value creation. Beyond the rhetoric of sustainability as a “feel good” story, a substantive approach with real implications for policymakers appears to be a decidedly unpopular vision for national leaders. This comes at a time when strong government support appears most critical.

Despite the seemingly grim implication of this inaction, or perhaps because of it, alternatives to government leadership are increasingly pursued by those seeking opportunities to positively impact pressing global issues.

More frequently the focus is turning to the corporate world to lead the way, for the flexibility, resources and potential for innovation that sits in contrast with the cumbersome structures and lagging processes of government bureaucracy. What would have been heresy even 20 years ago has now become our last best hope. But how might corporations fulfil this promise?

David Wheeler, president of Cape Breton University in Nova Scotia, has long advocated for the development of a uniquely Canadian vision of sustainability with the potential to set the country apart and give rise to more robust business models, catalyzing innovation and entrepreneurship across every sector of the economy. Over a decade ago, he initiated Sustainable Canada, a multi-sector study bringing together academics across a range of disciplines with government, civil society and private sector partners, to explore the potential of Canada to brand itself as a leader in sustainability.

Numerous opportunities were identified through this research for organizations in diverse sectors such as finance, forestry, energy and tourism to engage in sector-specific activities to advance sustainability and strategically position their companies internationally. What was lacking in most of these companies, however, was a mindset to connect the idea of sustainability with their core business operations and to use this vision to frame their strategic thinking.

A comprehensive review of the academic literature on the “business case” for sustainability, undertaken in 2008 by Wheeler and colleagues Elizabeth Kurucz and Barry Colbert, identified four distinct modes of value creation used by organizations as the rationale for building such a business case: cost and risk reduction, competitive advantage, reputation and legitimacy, and synergistic value creation. These approaches move along a spectrum from a primarily trade-offs approach focused on sustaining the organization itself, toward a more fulsome integration of stakeholder interests to manage for sustainability.

The findings from that meta-analysis and a related three-year project on Leadership for Sustainability suggested that rather than driving toward one definition or identifying the steps to building a more sustainable organization, no one approach will fit all. However tempting, reducing sustainability to a simple prescription appears to decrease effectiveness by increasing the risk of fragmented, rather than integrative thinking.

The implications of these findings for leaders are described by Kurucz and her colleagues in the book Reconstructing Value: Leadership Skills for a Sustainable World, which synthesizes the struggles of hundreds of practising managers across private, public and not-for-profit sectors. Leaders in organizations that have adopted a sustainability vision are trying to make sense of this societal ideal by translating it to their own day-to-day experience. Despite often strong personal motivations and beliefs that sustainability is a worthwhile pursuit, without a context-specific rationale for why their organization should engage in sustainability-focused business practices, the ideas did not gain significant traction or transform their business operations, products or services.

This meta-analysis, along with the insights from practising managers in sustainability-minded organizations, point toward the critical importance of engaging in sustainability conversations that give leaders the opportunity to connect their own business imperatives with a vision of sustainability to motivate participation and enhance the potential to drive value creation for multiple stakeholders.

A question raised through this work is whether some business cases are more prominent in one sector than another and, if so, could this inform policymakers’ decision making about how to motivate organizations to engage in a sustainability journey.

A study by Andree Gosselin O’Meara in 2013 explored this question by comprehensively examining the signals that companies across various sectors send to indicate their display of leadership in sustainability. The study focused on 180 companies from the largest six sectors of the Canadian economy (as per the number of companies represented in each sector of the Toronto Stock Exchange). A review of 10 metrics and 14 activities used by each company to signal its leadership in sustainability, supported by interviews with industry experts, identified striking differences among the sectors in what motivates companies to participate in sustainability.

Cost and risk reduction appeared as the main motivation for companies in Consumer Discretionary and Consumer Staples categories, while competitive advantage was the focus for those in Energy, Financials and Industrials. Reputation and legitimacy was the main concern for Materials companies, and while very few were motivated by synergistic value creation, there was moderate interest from the Financials, Industrials and Consumer Discretionary sectors.

The research results suggest there is good potential to identify leverage points to engage organizations in sector-specific conversations about sustainability that can help build momentum across the economy. They also reveal that very few organizations have yet to think about the full potential of sustainability by moving beyond trade-offs toward integrating stakeholder interests to resolve complex problems.

So the question then is: With the leadership challenges at the national level, and such diverse corporate interests, how best to advance these conversations?

A significant surge in new approaches to environmental governance led by the private sector and civil society reveals a range of experiments taking place. Efforts focused on the potential for multi-sector and trans-disciplinary initiatives to yield transformational outcomes acknowledge that addressing sustainability issues requires recognizing and understanding the different priorities of various stakeholder groups, but then refocusing attention on issue resolution, rather than foregrounding individual, sector or national interests.

One such experiment at the regional level is an approach initiated by collaborative civil society organization Sustainable Waterloo Region in Ontario. Since 2008, its flagship Regional Carbon Initiative has attracted over 60 member companies who have made or are working on specific public commitments toward carbon-emission reduction, supported by the region’s measurement framework, education forums and public recognition of achievements. This model is currently being replicated in other Ontario regions through a new scaled-up initiative, Sustainability CoLab, launching January 2014.

Multi-sector governance innovations such as this hold potential for us to collectively make progress in addressing issues facing our commonly held resources. Understanding the different motivations for sector partners to engage in sustainability initiatives can help foster these multi-sector collaborations; bringing them together in meaningful conversations can help identify creative ways forward that organizations have difficulty envisioning on their own.

To start these conversations, leaders need to develop the skills to engage all stakeholder groups to challenge their assumptions about business as usual, and to unleash an entrepreneurial approach to governance that generates context-specific solutions to complex global issues. Fostering this form of leadership in our own communities and organizations and focusing on solutions within our own sphere of influence will counteract the cynicism that the fairy tale of heroic leadership in government or industry inevitably produces. In this way, we might craft a new narrative together that will help build a more sustainable world.

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When completed, they will be the first nuclear units constructed in America since 1979. But getting them built is the problem. The expansion, which will consist of two 1,100-megawatt generating units, is 14 months over schedule and nearly $1 billion over budget. It could be 2018 before either reactor finally starts feeding the grid.

The project has sparked widespread backlash from consumer advocates, environmentalists and even a local libertarian Tea Party group. This summer, an economist working for Georgia’s Public Service Commission slammed the project, saying that if regulators knew how expensive the process would be from the beginning, the expansion never would have been approved.

“If a decision had to be made today to build a new nuclear project, it would not be justified on the basis of these results,” Philip Hayet, a nuclear consultant with the commission, said in August.

Just a week before that rebuke, Duke Energy announced plans to scrap a 2,200-megawatt nuclear power plant in Florida as the projected costs climbed to $24 billion and the estimated time of completion was moved out to 2024. Duke had already spent $1 billion on the cancelled project, which ratepayers will need to soak up in the coming years. In Ontario, ground zero of Canada’s nuclear industry, plans to build new reactors totaling more than 2,000 megawatts were scrapped in October because of the high price tag and falling power demand in the province.

Meanwhile, 2,600 miles away in California, the future of the power sector is starting to emerge. There, in the first half of 2013, more than 7,300 solar photovoltaic (PV) systems were installed on residential rooftops without any help from state incentives. Although the 33 megawatts of systems did qualify for net metering (a payment from the utility for the retail value of the solar electricity) and a federal investment tax credit, installers were able to make the economics work outside the state’s solar promotion program.

“It would be hard to overstate the significance of this,” said Shayle Kann, vice-president at GTM Research, who crunched the numbers (disclosure: the author of this article works for GTM’s sister media division). “This is emblematic of a sea change in the solar industry and, even more importantly, the energy industry.”

Directly comparing the baseload generation potential of a fully constructed nuclear plant with several thousand distributed solar systems would be a stretch. But the juxtaposition of these two experiences – years of delay and billions of dollars in cost overruns for building a centralized nuclear plant versus the rapid installation of distributed solar PV with fewer incentives – offers a look at where the electricity industry is headed.

The last five years have set the stage for a major transition in the U.S. power sector. With natural gas prices still hovering at historic lows, utilities are scrapping plans for nuclear and coal plants in favour of combined-cycle gas plants. And with the cost of wind and solar dropping, renewables are also dominating new power plant development. For example, U.S. utilities could purchase wind power in 2011 and 2012 for an average negotiated price of 4 cents per kilowatt-hour, according to the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

In 2012, wind was the single biggest source of new generation capacity in America, beating even natural gas. And two-thirds of all distributed solar PV has been installed in the U.S. in just the last two years. The industry is expected to double solar installations in the next two years – deploying between now and 2015 what it previously took four decades to install.

Companies in the power sector are taking notice of these trends, which will bring big changes to the way electricity providers build, own and operate assets on the grid.

“The change is going to be about empowering the end-use consumer to make energy choices for themselves rather than having the government and the public service commissioners tell them how they’re going to get the power,” declared David Crane, CEO of the independent power company NRG Energy, in a recent television interview.

The Edison Electric Institute (EEI), a trade group representing the nation’s utilities, agreed with that assessment. Over the summer, the institute released a landmark report on disruptive energy technologies, declaring a coming transformation in the sector. But its prediction for the future wasn’t nearly as rosy as the one from NRG’s Crane.

“The financial risks created by disruptive challenges include declining utility revenues, increasing costs, and lower profitability potential, particularly over the long-term,” wrote Peter Kind, author of the EEI report.

There’s a much catchier phrase for those challenges that is becoming common in energy circles: “utility death spiral.”

Since the dawn of the electric grid, utilities have been tasked with building ever bigger facilities to meet ever-growing demand for power. In most cases, regulated utilities’ rate of return is tied to selling more electricity, so they have very little incentive to invest in energy efficiency or encourage their customers to invest in technologies like solar. This is the model that allowed large projects like the Vogtle nuclear plant to get financed with the help of ratepayers – even when costs skyrocket.

However, a few things have shaken up that traditional model. The first was deregulation in the 1990s, which broke up utility monopolies in some markets and gave consumers more choice. The second is the falling demand for power in America over the last few years. The third – one that is just now starting to emerge – is the improving economics of efficiency and distributed renewables. Growth is now coming quickly enough that utilities are worrying about what happens when customers don’t need to rely on the grid as much.

While that could be a good thing for people who are able to invest in a technology like solar, it could also lead to a smaller number of customers paying for the upkeep of the electrical grid. And if the cost of paying for grid-based electricity rises, investing in distributed energy looks even more attractive to those remaining customers. This is the iterative cycle known as the utility death spiral.

“We’re not seeing electric utilities pulling down their poles and their wires. We’re a long way from there. But we need to start planning now for when that does happen,” said Richard Caperton, managing director of energy at the Center for American Progress. “The ongoing technological improvements that make these new energy resources cheaper and cheaper will lead us down the path to the utility death spiral.”

Along with this summer’s report from EEI, a number of analysts have written detailed reports in recent months on how utilities can turn this potential death spiral into an opportunity. The latest, America’s Power Plan, was reviewed and authored by over 150 experts in the industry. It lays out a broad range of actions that regulators and power providers can take today to prepare for the future.

One of the most important changes would be to scrap traditional rate-of-return regulation for some kind of performance-based model. Rather than simply reward utilities for selling more units of energy, regulators could reward them for the quality of service they provide. This could enable utilities to use their expertise to manage third-party service providers and not feel threatened when customers consume fewer kilowatt-hours.

“We know that distributed energy resources are taking off so fast – it’s unstoppable,” said Sonia Aggarwal, one of the authors of America’s Power Plan. “We need to look at the way policies and market design can catch up with the technology.”

In theory, many of these policies are quite easy to implement, both in the United States and neighbouring jurisdictions in Canada. But in reality, there is often resistance from vertically integrated utilities, skepticism from regulators and ratepayer advocates, and concerns from policymakers in states with heavy dependence on fossil fuels. However, the conversation is starting to shift.

“The mere fact that we are seeing the beginning of customer disruption and that there is a large universe of companies pursuing this opportunity highlight the importance of proactive and timely planning to address these challenges early on,” concluded EEI’s Kind in his report.

For years, people talked about distributed energy in abstractions. But now that these technologies are growing faster every year, thought leaders in the power business are starting to address the new reality. The question is: will they address it quickly enough?

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Executives at the Walmart Global Sustainability Milestone Meeting in September rolled out two ambitious initiatives meant to reduce chemical and pesticide use throughout its supply chain. The Bentonville, Arkansas-based retailer will be working with suppliers to institute the Consumables Chemicals initiative, a policy to eliminate 10 priority chemicals from household cleaning, personal care, beauty and cosmetic supplies in products sold at both Sam’s Club and Walmart. Developed in collaboration with the Environmental Defense Fund, it will also focus on expanding public disclosure of ingredients. Some companies have issued restricted substances lists, says Sarah Vogel, director of EDF’s environmental health program, but “no other company is requiring the all-important, but often forgotten, second step to truly transformational phase-outs: putting a system in place that avoids regrettable chemical substitutions.”

With groceries accounting for 51 per cent of Walmart’s U.S. sales last year and expanded home delivery service on the horizon, pesticide use now accounts for roughly half of the retailer’s carbon footprint. The company also announced new agreements with 15 key suppliers to lower pesticide use, with the goal of cutting fertilizer use by up to 14 million acres of American farmland by 2020. “Using less energy, greener chemicals, fewer fertilizers and more recycled materials is the right thing to do for the planet and it’s right for our customers and our business,” said Walmart president and chief executive Mike Duke in a statement.

The world’s largest retailer has grown increasingly aggressive in pursuing sustainability initiatives, even as its fierce opposition to organized labour and higher wages remains a contentious issue. Hundreds of U.S. employees took part in demonstrations across 15 cities in September. The company has been accused of deliberately avoiding Affordable Care Act health insurance requirements by hiring more temporary workers. This has been paired with attempts to reduce the number of employees per store to save costs, which has affected sales. In a victory for labour advocates, Walmart backtracked on the temporary worker policy in late September by moving 35,000 workers to full-time status in an attempt to improve employee performance and retention.

Zero: JP Morgan

A wholly owned subsidiary of JPMorgan Chase is currently under criminal investigation for obstruction of justice in regards to a regulatory probe into electricity market manipulation. The largest bank by asset size in the United States settled Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) allegations that it exploited electricity power market loopholes with a $410 million payment on July 30, but may have attempted to head off the investigation by withholding key documents from the FERC. The commission alleged that JPMorgan exploited loopholes in the electricity trading markets to drive up prices in the Midwest and California between 2010 and 2012. It suspended JPMorgan from participating in the electric power market in November 2012 while conducting its investigation on the grounds that the company “made factual misrepresentations and omitted material information over the course of several months.” JPMorgan did not admit any wrongdoing in the July settlement, and is “pleased to have this matter behind us,” according to JPMorgan spokesman Brian Marchiony. It has stated repeatedly that all required documents were turned over to the FERC in a timely manner. No charges have yet been filed.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Manhattan U.S. Attorney’s Office began to investigate JPMorgan’s actions in the aftermath of the July settlement, after several federal lawmakers began questioning the terms of the agreement. Massachusetts senators Elizabeth Warren and Edward Markey wrote FERC demanding to know why no employees who “impeded the commission’s investigations” were being held accountable. The Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations has launched its own probe into the terms behind the FERC settlement, focused in part on allegations of a cover-up.

Faced with over a dozen investigations by separate federal agencies, states and foreign governments on everything from foreign bribery allegations to questionable debt collection practices, JPMorgan posted a rare loss in the third quarter, with fines wiping out quarterly profits. It has paid $3.68 billion in total throughout 2013. The Wall Street Journal reported on Sept. 25 that JPMorgan may be facing the largest bank fine in history ($11 billion) over the fraudulent sales of mortgage-backed securities.

Click here to view our complete Heroes and Zeros series.

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