The new Climate Engagement Canada (CEC) initiative was launched last week by a group of more than two dozen of Canada’s largest asset managers, pension plans, insurers and banks. All agreed to collaborate on a three-year engagement program with the 40 companies to promote 1.5°C action plans with meaningful short-, medium- and long-term targets and to realign their capital expenditures and lobbying activities to support those goals.

Two years ago, the federal government’s Expert Panel on Sustainable Finance came out with a set of far-reaching recommendations to help shift Canada’s financial sector into gear on climate change. Among them was a push to establish a broad-based investor climate advocacy program to promote action by Canada’s largest greenhouse gas emitters on the Toronto Stock Exchange.

Globally, the $55-trillion investor coalition Climate Action 100+ was engaging 167 of the world’s largest publicly traded emitters to act on climate change, but only six corporations on the TSX made that list. The remaining out-of-scope Canadian companies, representing a collective 90% of the index market capitalization, are significantly owned by domestic investors — making Canadian-investor-led action critical.

“We saw the potential to adapt a successful international model to the Canadian landscape and expand our reach,” says Barbara Zvan, former member of the expert panel and now CEO of the newly formed University Pension Plan, which is participating in the initiative. “Not only in terms of the number of Canadian companies engaged but also the degree of financial sector mobilization behind ambitious climate actions and a determined transition.”

After more than a year of development and discussion, the expert panel’s recommendation is now a reality.

By coordinating efforts between not only share owners but also lenders and insurers – all major sources of capital for Canadian firms – the CEC initiative hopes to set shared expectations for corporations, who often hear inconsistent messaging from capital markets. Working together with other supportive institutions – stock exchanges, consultants, accounting firms and industry bodies – the initiative intends to promote clear and consistent expectations, and pathways to achieve them, across Canadian markets.  

We will be shining a light on which companies are doing this and working with Climate Engagement Canada to help raise the bar.
-Toby Heaps, CEO of Corporate Knights

“At its core, the program will feature heavy lifting by dedicated investor teams that work regularly with companies to promote our common expectations and benchmarks and then help those businesses to meet them,” says Kevin Thomas, CEO of the Shareholder Association for Research and Education (SHARE), a Canadian non-profit investor advocacy organization that will coordinate action and research for the initiative. “Engagement will be persistent, results will be measured, and we’ll work to achieve real-world outcomes that are meaningful for the climate and support just transitions for affected workers and communities. That’s what matters.”

Investor teams will be assigned to each focus company and provided with a benchmark of the company’s progress to date and gaps to address in their performance. Progress will be measured against a framework that evaluates year-on-year changes and identifies next steps for each company and the teams assigned to them.

In addition to the coordination of CEC engagements by SHARE, the Responsible Investment Association (RIA), a trade group promoting responsible investment in Canada’s retail and institutional markets, will act as the administrative and communications arm of the initiative.

“Investor interest in climate action is not new, but it is growing exponentially,” says Dustyn Lanz, RIA’s CEO. “What CEC brings to the table is a way for us to elevate our individual efforts into a common campaign. We can do more together than we can apart.”

Collectively, SHARE, RIA, the UN Principles for Responsible Investment and Ceres are the CEC’s founding partners. The initiative has invited broad participation from the financial sector, and, while Canadians will lead, it will encourage support from global investors that share its ambitions.

Corporate Knights will track the initiative’s progress in future issues, based on the CEC’s framework and expectations, to help distinguish the Canadian firms that are “walking the talk” on net-zero commitments from those who are not.

“Canadian companies have all the ingredients to win in a low-carbon future,  but this promise will only be realized with a step-change investment in climate solutions,” says Toby Heaps, CEO of Corporate Knights. “We will be shining a light on which companies are doing this and working with Climate Engagement Canada to help raise the bar.”

Jennifer Story is associate director of climate advocacy at SHARE.

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BNP Paribas Investment Partners, the Paris-based fund manager, is lobbying the pharma sector in support of the AllTrials campaign, which was started by U.K.-based Sense About Science, a charitable trust. The campaign is pushing for much greater transparency around clinical trials, a necessary and crucial step in the process of drug development. Unfortunately, around half of clinical trial results have never been published. Perhaps not a surprise, trials with negative results are twice as likely to remain unreported as those with positive results. At the same time, industry funded trials that have been published are much more likely than independently funded trials to show positive results. Helena Viñes Fiestas, who heads sustainability research at BNP, said some companies have faced enormous fines by not disclosing clinical trial data. As recently as 2013, several pharmaceutical firms paid over $10 billion in fines for not fully articulating secondary effects they were aware of. Companies have also been criticized for wasting significant amounts of money conducting unnecessary trials when such funds could be better directed towards research and development and trials that have greater potential.

Ottawa moves to protect Canada’s “brand” abroad

Canada is introducing a new social responsibility policy aimed at protecting the country’s positive “brand” in overseas markets, and mining and energy companies that don’t toe the line could find themselves cut off from government support. That includes financing and other supportive services from agencies such as Export Development Canada, not to mention the many Canadian embassies around the world that help companies gain a foothold in foreign markets. The news was reported in Friday’s Globe and Mail, which said that International Trade Minister Ed Fast is also appointing a new corporate social responsibility counselor with added powers to assure policy compliance. In addition, the federal government is requiring that resource companies comply with new transparency standards, by reporting, for example, payments made to foreign governments.

Viking women failing to crack glass ceiling

Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Finland are hailed as being more civilized societies because of the equal opportunity provided to women. As The Economist points out, the state provides world-leading coverage for childcare and maternity leave, and more women graduate from Nordic universities than men. Take a tour of their respective parliaments and women are equals or dominate the chambers, and mandatory quotas on corporate boards assure women are well represented. In the C-suite, however, and even among senior managers, women aren’t faring so well. As the magazine points out, Denmark, for one, was ranked 72^nd by the World Economic Forum when it came to the gender gap in upper management of publicly traded firms.

Barclays, MSCI launch green bond index family

Barclays and MSCI have come out with a new green bond index family that measures the global market of fixed income securities issued to fund projects and initiatives that have direct environmental benefits. Securities must pass an independent and objective assessment by MSCI ESG Research to be included in the index family. The assessment looks at how proceeds of the bond issue will be used, whether projects meet criteria, how funds will be managed, and how results will be reported. Additional fixed income index criteria are then applied to this screened universe to identify index membership on a monthly basis. “The availability of market standard indices is important in establishing clear, broadly accepted guidelines for the new issuers rapidly entering the market,” said Sean Kidney of the Climate Bonds Initiative. “The stature of Barclays and MSCI will help to bring attention to green bonds.”

NYC comptroller Scott Stringer leads board accountability project

The man who has auditing power over New York’s $75 billion annual budget and oversees the city’s five municipal pension funds – which together represent $160 billion in assets – is leading an initiative that aims to bring better corporate governance practices to the boardrooms of big U.S. corporations. Specifically, Stringer wants to leverage the huge shareholder clout that the country’s public pension funds have to push through long-needed governance changes. Corporate Knights’ managing editor Jeremy Runnalls chatted with Stringer about the Boardroom Accountability Project, which was launched last week with a coalition of large public pension plans. Its goal: pressure companies to let shareholders that control at least 3 per cent of company shares to nominate their own board candidates. “The fact is that friends of friends are still placed on boards and then often make decisions that are not in the long-term interests of shareowners,” Stringer told Runnalls. “I think this project promises to transform the dynamic between shareowners and corporate boards by giving investors real power to nominate corporate directors.

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Duhigg uses the example of former Alcoa chief executive Paul O’Neill, who took a struggling U.S. aluminum manufacturer and turned it around by being obsessed with one operational indicator: workplace safety.

Not only did O’Neill improve the company’s lost-day injury rate to 0.2 per 100 workers, down from 1.86, he created a culture of safety that has since seen the rate drop to 0.125. Workplace safety statistics are now published publicly on the company’s corporate website, in near real time. On O’Neill’s watch, the decline coincided with a quintupling of Alcoa’s net income and a 15-fold increase in revenue.

An impressive accomplishment, one that got O’Neill handpicked by former U.S. president George W. Bush as America’s 72^nd Secretary of the Treasury. And little did he know that, 13 years after leaving Alcoa, his work at the company would be referenced by the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) to support new disclosure regulation – an expanded “name and shame” rule – that has proven highly unpopular with many American businesses.

David Michaels, an assistant secretary with the U.S. Department of Labor, revealed the details at a press conference last November with a cheerleading O’Neill by his side. Under the proposed rule, employers with 250 or more employees would have to start electronically reporting to the OSHA all serious workplace injuries soon after they occur. That data – including company name, type of injury, and cause – would be posted online for anyone to see.

Extreme Disclosure

Citing the fact that about three million American workers at private companies got injured or ill on the job in 2012, Michaels said such a rule is necessary to “save lives and limbs.”

“How will this make workplaces safer?” he asked. “Public posting of workplace injury and illness information will nudge employers to better identify and eliminate hazards.” The better public disclosure will allow businesses to compare themselves against their peers, while prospective employees will have a way to find out how companies in a sector rank on work safety, Michaels explained.

O’Neill, when introduced later, praised the initiative. “I hope it’s a step but not the final step.”

Many industry watchers cringed, including Howard Mavity, an Atlanta-based labour lawyer with the law firm Fisher & Phillips.

“It’s possible this information will be misconstrued and used unfairly to sully the reputations of employers,” wrote Mavity in a guest post on Forbes.com earlier this year. He described the data published as “lagging indicators” of events that have already happened. “Anyone in the safety profession knows that putting too much emphasis on lagging indicators fails to increase workplace safety.”

Employers should be encouraged instead to do better at communicating safety to employees, Mavity added. “They shouldn’t have to waste valuable time defending themselves to the media. Taking the time everyday to remind employees to be safe is what works. Not publicly shaming employers.”

Joe Trauger, vice-president of human resources policy for the National Association of Manufacturers, said the proposed rules would make information publicly available without context and create confusion. “The raw data may result in unfair conclusions or judgments about a company or particular industry based on information that is not indicative of the actual safety record.”

The OSHA forged ahead nonetheless. In September it formally announced the new rule, which will come into force on January 1. It requires large businesses, with some exceptions, to continue reporting job-related fatalities but within eight hours of happening. On top of that, worker amputations, eye losses, and hospitalizations from injuries must be reported within 24 hours. The reports will have to be called in or submitted via a web portal, but industries with low injury and illness rates are not subject to the rule.

Michaels, in a statement, called hospitalizations and amputations “sentinel events” that reveal serious hazards in a workplace. “An intervention is warranted to protect the other workers at the establishment.” The idea is that by putting such public pressure on an employer it will be forced to raise its game.

Going too far?

In Canada, detailed reporting to worker compensation boards is required. For more serious injuries and fatalities, each province’s ministry of labour must be notified. But data is only publicly released once it is aggregated. Only when a company is investigated and formally charged for a workplace incident are its name and details of the event publicly accessible.

“When you look at how the OSHA operates in the United States versus provincial and federal structures here, things are publicized in Canada but not like south of the border,” said workplace safety consultant Jeff Thorne. The media may discover and reveal details independently, but news outlets are picky about what they cover. “Unless it involves a young worker or it’s a major fatality at a large corporation, you may never hear about it.”

He said in Ontario there have been limited discussions about creating a better way to register occupational injuries and fatalities, but whether such a database would be accessible to the public is unclear. “It’s hard to tell how far along that discussion is.”

Norm Keith, a lawyer with Toronto-based Fasken Martineau who specializes in workplace health and safety, said there is definitely a need for better data collection and disclosure standards, allowing apples-to-apples comparisons across geographies and within sectors, but he has reservations about the name-and-shame approach.

“I have many clients going to trial to defend not so much that they think they’re perfect, but because they can’t afford a conviction in a press release,” he said. A company’s competitors are more than happy to highlight that information when bidding for business in hopes of winning a contract.

Authorities need to be careful in how far they go, Keith said. “Is there benefit from a deterrence perspective? Ultimately, there has to be some fairness and consistency in the way they do it.” For this reason, he added, naming and shaming should probably continue to be governed by the courts.

Corporate Knights contacted the OSHA’s media relations department to request an interview. We were told to submit some questions in advance, which we did. Among them: How measurably effective has this approach been so far? Nearly three weeks after the original request, and after two follow-up queries that elicited no reply, the agency has been silent.

Absent supporting research, workplace safety experts will be watching closely over the next couple of years to see if the U.S. name-and-shame rules do, in fact, lead to a reduction in workplace fatalities and injuries. From Corporate Knights perspective, improving workplace safety disclosure standards, and requiring companies to self-report this high-level data in quarterly and annual reports, may be a more effective approach than government’s creating shame lists, especially when companies may not ultimately be charged with a workplace violation.

Such an approach would set a baseline standard for all companies, and give industry leaders, such as Alcoa, a chance to demonstrate best practices and rise above their peers.

(This story is the fifth in a series of articles on workplace safety that will appear on corporateknights.com during October, in partnership with and with funding support from the Canadian Society of Safety Engineering and the Center for Safety and Health Sustainability. Visit our Workplace Safety landing page to follow the series.)

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The data says they aren’t, and this has many in the occupational health and safety profession concerned.

Corporate Knights Capital, in its recent report “Measuring Sustainability Disclosure,” analyzed all seven so-called first-generation sustainability indicators and found that only 11 per cent of the world’s 4,609 largest companies disclosed their worker injury rate in 2012.

It was the lowest disclosure rate of all seven indicators. By comparison, 39 per cent of companies disclosed their greenhouse-gas emissions and 59 per cent reported pay equity data.

For some industries, such as financial services, the low disclosure rate arguably makes sense. For example, only 2 per cent of the 382 largest banks reported workplace injury and fatality numbers in 2012. Of the world’s 156 biggest insurance companies, 1 per cent reported fatality figures and 3 per cent disclosed injuries.

Industries related to manufacturing, construction and other higher-risk activities are better at reporting, but have a long way to go. Of 369 large energy companies, only 14 per cent disclosed workplace deaths while 17 per cent reported injuries. Automotive and capital goods companies didn’t do much better.

“Human resources have become one of the most important productive assets in many industries, so it is quite disturbing that only a minority of companies are reporting on safety metrics at the workplace,” said Michael Yow, lead analyst at Corporate Knights Capital. “That only 17 per cent of the world’s oil and gas companies are reporting on worker safety is quite alarming, given they represent one of the most hazardous industries out there.”

The best discloser was the materials industry, where 20 per cent of the 406 companies analyzed reported fatalities and 33 per cent reported injuries. Still far short of where industry needs to be on worker safety, experts say.

“It’s amazing how often safety is left out of the sustainability discussion,” said Jeff Thorne, a workplace safety consultant with Occupational Safety Group. “It’s still a newer concept, believe it or not, to include safety as a performance indicator.”

But as Tom Cecich, chair of the U.S.-based Center for Safety and Health Sustainability (CSHS) told Corporate Knights, “High profile, tragic global incidents have highlighted the need for better occupational health and safety transparency and reporting.”

(Disclosure: CSHS is co-sponsor of this Workplace Safety web series).

Questionable Data

Indeed, poor disclosure isn’t the only problem. The CSHS reviewed the corporate social responsibility, sustainability and annual reports from 100 companies that appeared on Corporate Knights’ 2011 Global 100 ranking.

In a report it released in February 2013, the CSHS revealed a “high variability in terms and definitions” used by companies that disclosed workplace safety metrics, making it difficult to compare company performance.

“Corporate transparency is not achieved simply by disclosing information,” according to the report. “The information disclosed must also be meaningful.”

Part of the problem, it concluded, was lack of clarity from sustainability reporting frameworks, most notably the widely used Global Reporting Initiative (GRI). For example, GRI only asks companies to provide information on “total workforce,” but it doesn’t define “worker,” leaving it open to interpretation. Does it include contract workers? Temporary workers? What about workers further down the supply chain?

The report also found that 15 different methods were used to define a “report-worthy injury” or incident and six different formulas were used to calculate an overall injury rate. Companies were either ignoring GRI guidelines or being confused by them. In other words, the guidelines appeared to be ineffective.

It’s no surprise that in 2012, when GRI began accepting public comment for its planned fourth-generation guidelines, the issue of occupational health and safety received the fourth-highest number of submissions. In response, the GRI decided to create a working group for workplace safety that would inform updated guidelines.

The goal was to improve clarity and transparency of workplace health and safety guidelines. Despite good intentions, not much has happened since. “As of October 2014 GRI has not started the workgroup due to funding issues,” said Cecich.

The main reason CSHS produced its 2013 report was to offer insight for the multi-industry stakeholders expected to sit on the working group. The report’s recommendations were clear:

• Standardize terms and definitions to eliminate confusion and create a consistency of reported data that allows apples-to-apples comparisons within sectors and across geographies;

• Encourage complete reporting of all leading indicators related to occupational health and safety, as well as reporting over multiple years to allow for internal and external stakeholders to gauge whether a company is improving or not;

• Expand coverage beyond just company staff to include temporary workers and subcontractors, as well as workers in the supply chain, all of them “growing and highly vulnerable segments of the global workforce.”

(This story is the fourth in a series of articles on workplace safety that will appear on corporateknights.com during October, in partnership with and with funding support from the Canadian Society of Safety Engineering and the Center for Safety and Health Sustainability. Visit our Workplace Safety landing page to follow the series.)

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The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the agency that regulates all Internet addresses, announced Tuesday that Vancouver-based social venture Big Room can have exclusive control and operation of a new Internet registry for the dot-eco top-level domain.

It means domain names like cars.eco and construction.eco – even corporateknights.eco – could soon be the home for new environmentally focused websites, and groups such as Greenpeace and 350.org could be part of the network approved to sell them.

It’s a landmark achievement for the little Canadian company, which was co-founded in 2007 by Jacob Malthouse, Trevor Bowden and Anastasia O’Rourke, who met while working together at the United Nations Environment Programme in Geneva.

Competition for the dot-eco extension has been intense. At one point a California-based company called Dot Eco LLC, backed by former U.S. vice-president Al Gore, was lobbying aggressively to be selected as operator of a dot-eco registry.

Not that Big Room was going to be intimidated. To be favoured by ICANN, applicants had to demonstrate a high level of community support for their bids. Big Room’s founders not only worked full time over the years building widespread support within the global environmental community, they also structured the for-profit company as a community-based social venture that has since been certified as a B Corporation.

“It’s operated more like a public-private partnership, so the community will be written into the contracts of ICANN,” explained Malthouse in an interview. “We’re a company, yes, but the community is in charge.”

That community is essentially a coalition of more than 50 environmental organizations from around the world, including WWF, Greenpeace, the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Carbon Disclosure Project, the David Suzuki Foundation, and Conservation International.

“It’s a huge coalition, one of the largest the environmental community has ever put together, and they all wrote in to support our application,” Malthouse added.

Green Cross International, a group founded by former Soviet Union president Mikhail Gorbachev, also threw its support behind Big Room. Eventually, Gore saw the writing on the wall and backed off, Malthouse speculated. “Once his team saw there was another application that was community-based and had the support of WWF and Greenpeace, I think he thought our approach was a better way to go.”

The former U.S. vice-president wasn’t the only one with a change of heart. Climate activist group 350.org, founded by U.S. environmental journalist Bill McKibben, initially supported the U.S.-centric Dot Eco bid but decided later to switch its allegiance to the broader-based Big Room.

In the end, Big Room had three competitors going after dot-eco – Planet Dot Eco LLC, which had some environmental backers, and two domain industry companies that just saw dot-eco as an opportunity to print money. Had Big Room failed to convince ICANN of its higher purpose, the process would have defaulted into an auction that would result in dot-eco going to the highest bidder.

That the Vancouver venture was successful has created excitement within the environmental community. “The potential for the global environment movement to collaborate like never before has been unleashed,” WWF International’s Richard McLellan said in a statement after learning of Big Room’s winning bid.

The Hard Work Begins

Winning control of dot-eco wasn’t easy, or cheap. The application fee alone was about $200,000, and additional funding was required for administrative and legal work, not to mention the time and effort that went into building a global coalition. Some social investors stepped up, providing the funding that Big Room needed.

But now, in many ways, the real work begins. “The community has a tonne of work to do to figure out how to do this right,” Malthouse said. “The important thing now is not to rush it, but to make sure the community has a model we’re all happy with.”

And when can organizations and individuals start registering for their dot-eco addresses? “I would hesitate to put a timeline on it, but sometime next year for sure. We have our work cut out for us to make sure this happens,” he added.

Good governance will be key. The coalition of environmental groups that backed Big Room calls itself the Dot Eco Community Organization (DECO), which has developed a set of by-laws aimed at unifying members around a common set of goals.

A community council of DECO members makes recommendations to its board, which works with Big Room to make sure the policies that result are put into practice. The International Institute for Sustainable Development, headquartered in Winnipeg, provides secretariat services for the coalition.

Big Room and the dot-eco council, co-chaired by WWF’s McLellan, have some difficult questions to answer before they launch the registry. If the dot-eco domain is to only be used for the greater good, how will that “good” be defined? Who can and can’t register a dot-eco extension?

Under what conditions, if any, can oil.eco or coal.eco be registered? Nuclear.eco and naturalgas.eco could be even more controversial. How will the community decide if a company, such as ExxonMobil or TransCanada, can register the dot-eco extension to their own brand names? Will so-called greenwashing be forbidden, and if so, how will this be monitored and enforced?

“There’s a whole discussion that needs to take place about what it means to be qualified as dot-eco,” said Malthouse. “We have to make sure we give the right access to the names, and eliminate squatting.”

On the other hand, the Big Room-operated registry has an opportunity to get quite creative with how dot-eco name extensions are sold. Typically, a registry approves registrars to sell the extensions. Malthouse said one option being considered is to allow established, trusted organizations like Greenpeace to become registrars – basically domain-name resellers – under an arrangement in which Greenpeace gets a percentage of the proceeds that it can put toward its own environmental initiatives and campaigns.

The rules for such an arrangement would have to be carefully crafted, but the benefits it could bring to the environmental community are potentially huge.

Dot-Eco Has Competition

An online environmental war of sorts is likely to take place over the next few years as dot-eco battles to be seen as more credible and popular than its rival dot-green domain, control of which was won by auction back in March by Afilias, the world’s second-largest domain registry.

Malthouse and others in the environmental community worry that dot-green domains will be sold to anyone willing to pay, and that this will result in a corporate rush to lock up dot-green extensions as part of industry greenwashing efforts. Websites such as coal.green and oilsands.green could soon be promoted on highway billboards, bus shelters, print advertisements and TV commercials.

Over time, this might not be a bad thing – as word spreads about the watered-down nature of dot-green domains, it could make dot-eco names that much more legitimate and respected in the eyes of consumers.

Dot-organic is another “green” domain that became available earlier this year, but it is more narrowly focused than dot-eco. While not community-governed like dot-eco, the dot-organic registry does require that any company applying for a dot-organic domain have products carrying a certified organic seal and be third-party qualified.

Other than the Canadian Internet Registration Authority (CIRA), which is the rule-setter and registry for dot-ca name extensions, Big Room is the only other Canadian organization that has exclusive registry status for a top-level domain.

Over the past few years, ICANN has considered nearly 2,000 applications for more than 1,000 top-level name extensions, ranging from dot-blog to dot-wine. Of those, 17 applicants – including Big Room – asked for a “community evaluation” as a way to lock up a domain extension before it goes to auction. A community evaluation is based on a 16-point scoring system. A score of 14 is required to pass.

Of those, only dot-eco, dot-radio, dot-hotel and dot-Osaka met or exceeded the 14-point threshold. One that surprisingly didn’t win approval was a group seeking to control dot-gay. As the U.K.-based news site The Register put it, “The application was, the evaluators complained, simply not gay enough.”

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Nearly 6,000 clean technology companies from 60 countries were nominated for consideration, so the fact that Vancouver, B.C.-based General Fusion made it onto such an elite list begs the question: After more than half a century of trying, is commercial-scale nuclear fusion finally just around the corner?

The list was created with the input of an 84-person expert panel, so it’s not like a couple of people in a room arbitrarily picked their favorites over a beer. General Fusion was compared against thousands of companies with far less risky and ambitious goals, but it still rose above. Not to suggest it wasn’t a controversial pick among the judges. The company also made it onto the Marmite list – like the English breakfast spread, you either love it or hate it.

“Many panelists admire the company for ‘attempting something so audacious,’” the report’s authors pointed out. “Will it be commercial in the next 10 years? Is it too dependent on fickle government regulations? Conclusion: The company has the potential to revolutionize power generation if it can succeed with its technical milestones. A binary bet, it seems.”

I’ve been a close observer of General Fusion for a decade now, having written a chapter about the company in my book Mad Like Tesla. Corporate Knights also mentioned General Fusion last year in a series on the future of nuclear. So like Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos, who is an investor in General Fusion, I may be biased. I hate Marmite, but I like General Fusion.

Canada Doesn’t Gain, or Slide

Canadian companies continued to do relatively well on the 2014 Cleantech 100 list. Like the lists from 2013 and 2012, five companies made it onto this year’s list – three of them returning, two of them new.

In addition to General Fusion, water treatment company Axine Water Technologies, also from Vancouver, is a newcomer to the list. In fact, three of the five Canadian companies on the list are based in and around Vancouver. Axine has developed a chemical-free system that can treat high concentrations of toxic compounds that are otherwise difficult to chemically break down. Its system can be scaled up, and is currently being aimed at the treatment of oil and gas process water.

The other Vancouver-based company on the list is Ostara Nutrient Recovery Technologies, which has been a permanent fixture on the list for the past five years. Ostara recovers phosphorus and nitrogen from municipal and industrial water streams and transforms them into eco-friendly fertilizer products that can boost food production.

Also in the 2014 group is Montreal-based Enerkem, which uses a thermal-chemical process to turn non-recyclable municipal solid waste into biofuels and other chemicals. The company launched its first full-scale commercial facility in Edmonton in June

The final Canadian company is Calgary-based FilterBoxx, which, like Axine, has technology for treating process water from oil operations – specifically from enhanced oil recovery and unconventional drilling projects.

Other Observations

Three scientists – two Japanese, one American – won the Nobel Prize in physics on Tuesday for inventing blue light-emitting diodes (LEDs), so it’s fitting to point out that three companies on the 2014 Cleantech 100 list are LED innovators: Glo from Lund, Sweden, a developer of nanowire-based LEDs; Digital Lumens of Boston, a designer of intelligent LED lighting systems for industry; and Dutch company LUXeXcel Group, which uses 3D printing technology to make LED optics.

Why is the development of blue LEDs important? We know LEDs are super-efficient and long-lasting forms of lighting, but until the development of blue LEDs all we had was green and red – that is, an important part of the light spectrum was missing. By adding blue to the mix, white LED lights could finally be created, in effect opening up the possibility for LED technology to go mainstream as a high-efficiency lighting standard.

Overall, 17 countries are represented on this year’s Cleantech 100 list, though the United States dominates with 62 companies. The most popular and fastest-growing sector appears to be energy efficiency, which is represented by 24 companies. Solar made a bit of a comeback with nine companies, up from six companies in 2013.

Cleantech Group, the organization that produces the Cleantech 100, identified the following six “mega themes” from this year’s batch:

• Growth of consumer-centric business models.
• A focus on emerging market demand and the next go-to markets.
• Intensification of cleantech applications for use in the oil and gas industry.
• A trend toward more decentralized energy services and “downstream” solar products and services.
• A continuing push to transform waste into wealth.
• A rise in big data solutions for utilities.

Cleantech Group also found that large corporations are more active than ever as partners with cleantech startups, whether through investment, licensing, or acquisition. General Electric was identified as most active, followed by Siemens, Google, BP and utility E.ON.

The post Cleantech 100 goes nuclear appeared first on Corporate Knights.

The goal is to have a common standard that will allow extractive companies to report how much they pay governments for access to their resources, regardless of what stock exchange they are listed on. Citizens should be able to use this information to track the profits from mines and oil wells and make sure their political representatives are spending resource revenues wisely.

But, writing a rule that will cover the three biggest stock exchanges for extractive companies—Toronto, New York and London—is not easy. And now that the E.U. Commission has opened consultations on what it will accept from companies reporting in other countries, the doors are open for further negotiation and, possibly, a less coherent standard.

The United States passed a law in 2010 as part of the Dodd Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act that will require oil, gas and mining companies to publicly disclose how much they pay governments for access to their resources.

The European Commission followed suit in 2013 with a law that will require all companies listed on European stock exchanges to disclose payments over €100,000 to all levels of governments, in all countries, for all projects, without exemptions by November 2015.

This is considered the gold standard for payment disclosure because it provides a level of granularity that citizens need if they are going to inquire about specific projects, says Colin Tinto, a campaigner at U.K.-based Global Witness, an organization that looks at the economic networks behind conflict and corruption.

Before the E.U. members could implement the law, the American Petroleum Institute challenged the U.S. rule in court, saying it would place an undue burden on the industry and affect competition. The U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia sent the rule back to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission with the understanding that it can either rewrite the rule or provide a better justification. The final rule is scheduled to come up for discussion some time before March 2015.

In the meantime, the Canadian government has begun working on its own payment transparency law to be implemented by April 2015. Natural Resources Canada (NRCan) has been working with provincial and territorial governments, industry, civil society and Aboriginal groups to design the law.

To make things easier on companies listed on multiple stock exchanges, the Canadian government is working with the U.S. and E.U. to align its law with the existing international standards and to ensure that there is a level playing field for companies operating domestically and abroad, says Jacinthe Perras, spokesperson for the NRCan.

But, some Canadian companies do not like the way the E.U. law has been written and Talisman Energy Inc., a Canadian oil and gas company, is calling for a different standard altogether.

“We do not believe that trying to draft Canadian rule so that they are ‘equivalent’ with the most severe set of rules currently proposed is of any service to Canadian companies,” the company says in its letter to NRCan.

Instead, Talisman is calling for anonymous country-by-country reporting with exemptions in countries where it is forbidden to reveal how much companies have paid governments.

The suggestion that Canada can pass a different rule and have it accepted in the E.U. is a misunderstanding of the law and would make it impossible to declare equivalency between the two reporting standards, says Tinto.

The Commission has yet to announce an official position on what it will require from companies that want to report in other countries.

“We have not taken a decision yet,” says Didier Millerot, spokesperson for the Commission. “We cannot say that if Canada allows for exemptions in its legislation that we won’t accept it. We have to look at the Canadian system as a whole…. This is also a political decision.”

A global transparency standard would allow for comparison and make it easier for citizens to access, use and interpret information, says Claire Woodside, Director of PWYP Canada, the global network of organizations pushing for transparency in the oil, gas and mining industries.

Any efforts to keep company names a secret or to make exemptions for certain countries will increase opportunities for the theft and mismanagement of revenues, which robs citizens of the economic benefits of natural resource wealth, she added.

Brent Anderson, Manager of External Relations at Talisman says, “the Canadian government should take care of its own citizens and companies first, and foreign citizens should be protected by their own countries’ laws.”

When assessing a third-country rule, Millerot says, the Commission would be looking to see whether the laws aim to achieve the same end result.

“It’s a transparency instrument that is there to empower citizens, stakeholders, NGOs and all those working towards more transparency and to encourage better use of natural resources by the countries that are sitting on them,” he added.

“That’s the first, indispensable step: that we understand each other and we know where we are going,” he says.

The post Enforcing transparency appeared first on Corporate Knights.

With unique geographic granularity, “Risky Business: The Economic Risks of Climate Change in the United States,” shows that different regions and key sectors of the U.S. economy are at risk if climate change continues to go unaddressed by the business community and decision makers.

“Every year that goes by without a comprehensive public and private sector response to climate change is a year that locks in future climate events that will have a far more devastating effect on our local, regional, and national economies,” says the report.

The report acknowledges that American investors are familiar with navigating economic risk. But climate change is a special case because, while the risks may seem far off, they are directly tied to decisions made today.

“Climate change is nature’s way of charging us compound interest for doing the wrong thing,” said billionaire philanthropist Tom Steyer in an online statement. “The longer we wait to address the growing risks of climate change, the more it will cost us all…It would be silly to allow these risks to accumulate to the point where we can no longer manage them.”

The Risky Business report is co-chaired by Steyer, Henry Paulson, U.S. Secretary of the Treasury between 2006 and 2009, and former Big Apple mayor Michael Bloomberg. The three men tasked the world’s largest catastrophe-modeling company, the Rhodium Group, with producing a report that combines peer-reviewed climate science with the estimated impacts of climate change on the U.S. economy.

The results show that key sectors of the American economy will be at risk of severe impacts if climate change is not brought under control:

• Sea-level rise is expected to put $238 billion to $507 billion worth of coastal property below sea level by 2100;
• Extreme heat will affect labor productivity and put employees who have to work outdoors at risk of severe health impacts as the number of days above 95°F is expected to rise to 27 to 50 days per year—two to three times higher than the past 30 years. Air-conditioning in these regions will strain the energy system and drive up costs for consumers;
• Finally, any gains enjoyed by farmers in the north of the country will be offset by losses in the midwest and south where there is a risk of losing 50 to 70 per cent of annual average crop yields.

While some regions will experience more extreme climate-related conditions than others, the report is addressed to investors across the nation: “Just because it’s not hot where you are doesn’t mean you won’t feel the heat of climate change.”

This is not only meant to be a wake-up call to investors; the report is asking them to work with governments and key decision-makers to come up with solutions.

“Our goal with the Risky Business Project is…to bring American business and government—doubters and believers alike—together to look squarely at the potential risks posed by climate change, and to consider whether it’s time to take out an insurance policy of our own,” states the report.

This week, Steyer and Paulson are expected to meet with Treasury Secretary Jack Lew and other White House leaders to discuss the report, which is expected to gain considerable political traction. Insurance industry officials will also reportedly attend.

Last month Corporate Knights spoke to Steyer about why he’s leading a movement against dirty energy and building hope for a climate-friendly future. Read about it here.

The post Wanted: responsible investors appeared first on Corporate Knights.

Rand makes clear he doesn’t think we have to boil to death. “The good news is that we can solve the climate problem,” he writes. “The capital we need sits in our pension funds and money markets, the policy tools to unlock it are well understood and emerging innovations are fully capable of powering our civilization.”

Yet the fossil fuel party keeps rockin’ in the face of the risks, challenges and opportunities. The vested interests, the captains of industry, the politicians are all “paid very well to continue doing what they do.” They hire pseudo-experts to confuse and deny. They claim change is natural and we have nothing to do with it. They claim that it is simple fraud. They claim that other issues should have priority.

Rand explains why people so easily “rest blissfully in denial.” He distinguishes between “active” and “passive” deniers. Active deniers, he explains, are those who don’t actually believe what they are saying when they go on about it all being a left-wing plot to create a new world government. Passive deniers are similar to those who lived through the cold war years – they suffer from the “psychic numbing” of living under the constant threat of nuclear destruction, so they simply put the issue out of their minds.

“There are lots of reasons for passive denial,” he writes. “It’s not unreasonable. We may feel powerless or overwhelmed. We might want to avoid feelings of guilt. We are afraid of what it means for our children.”

Rand proposes a way to change the conversation and suggests that we take advantage of our cognitive biases, put on a happy face, and promote “a brave new world of clean energy abundance and sustainable economic growth.” The trouble is, everyone kind of likes things the way they are, with their cars and their granite counters their plane flights. Party on. But as notes, “The best parties are often followed by the worst hangovers, and the fossil fuel party has been a great one.”

Indeed it has. Unfortunately, we keep doing everything we can to postpone that hangover, thanks to hair-of-the-dog innovations like fracking and arctic drilling aimed at squeezing those last bits of hydrocarbons out of rocks and seabeds. Yet Rand says we have to cut our carbon emissions by 80 per cent by 2030. “It’s a massive affair. Replacing it in a generation – which we must do if we are to avoid catastrophic climate disruption – is daunting.” To do so, he proposes an energy moon shot – “a publicly directed new low-carbon energy mission that unlocks the engineering, industrial and financial might of the global market economy.”

It’s a huge job, writes Rand. Indeed, it’s much more ambitious in scope than the original moon shot. “The energy moon shot is a multi-stakeholder effort. Everyone rows in the same direction. Science sets the goal. Government provides the right policy support. Industry’s job is to get us there, not obfuscate the science or lobby against the policy. Industrialists, financiers, and captains of industry contribute to the debate and start by saying, ‘We get it, we’re on it.’”

This 21st century moon shot would include a serious carbon tax, next-generation nuclear (breeder reactors), carbon capture and enhanced geothermal systems that tap the heat of the earth 10 kilometres down. That’s big stuff requiring big engineering, reflecting Rand’s own bias as an optimistic engineer.

Then there is the low hanging fruit that you pick by fixing buildings. Rand did it himself with his own Planet Traveller hotel in Toronto, cutting its carbon footprint by three-quarters. The irony here is that having a planet of travellers comes with a much larger carbon footprint, and as Rand writes, “we’ll never go without long distance air travel… it’s part of the glue that makes us a global community.”

So we’re left with the belief that we can all live in a brave new world, all row in the same direction, and at the same time we can get captains of industry to say “we’re on it!” Rand is truly convinced we can avoid the hangover.

But the unanswered question remains: Will we?

The post Waking the frog appeared first on Corporate Knights.