A combination of pasta, hot dogs, oranges and green peppers got him through the month.

Some 30 years later, riding Tesla’s soaring stock, Musk passed Jeff Bezos to become the richest man on the planet, with a net worth of US$189.7 billion as of January 8, 2021.

In carrying out his mission to accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy, Musk has become a prophet for clean capitalism, with Tesla now ranked as the most sustainable and valuable car company in the world.

Musk is not alone. The Prince of Wales, the pope, and critically, a protest movement catalyzed by Greta Thunberg have all turned up the heat for businesses to get real about cooling the planet.

Prince Charles has long championed the environment and the central role industry and finance must play in its protection, but he’s dialled up the urgency significantly in the past year. In the fall, he said climate change poses such a severe threat that the world’s only option is to adopt a military-style response reminiscent of the U.S. Marshall Plan that helped rebuild post-war Europe 70 years ago.

In January, the prince looked back more than 800 years to the Magna Carta (which inspired a belief in the fundamental rights of people) to issue a companion document – the Terra Carta, or Earth Charter – that aims to enshrine the rights and value of nature in capitalism, inviting the world’s CEOs to make a sustainable future the growth story of our time.

Pope Francis once described unbridled capitalism as the “dung of the devil.” In a sign of the times, he recently gave his blessing to the Council for Inclusive Capitalism, a partnership between the Vatican and the leaders of some of the world’s largest businesses, including the chiefs of BP and Bank of America.

This seemingly unholy alliance seeks to make capitalism a more holy instrument for answering the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor.

There are now more than 300 companies, representing more than US$3.6 trillion in market cap, that have committed to a net-zero-emission target in line with a 1.5°C future.

Some worry these are empty words that give the impression that sufficient action is being taken – a sort of delay tactic. Thunberg, the teenaged activist who kicked off a citizens’ climate movement, says, “We must forget about net-zero – we need real zero.”

She spells out what that means:

“Immediately halt all investments in fossil fuel exploration and extraction. Immediately end all fossil fuel subsidies. And immediately and completely divest from fossil fuels. We don’t want these things done by 2050, 2030 or even [next year]. We want this done now.”

She’s right, but defunding carbon bombs will not be enough; not even close. The real action is going all in on funding climate solutions. What gets funded gets done. How we invest our trillions starting right now will determine our future.

To paraphrase Indian philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti, the climate-solution revolution is today, not tomorrow. The litmus test for companies and countries (and anyone, really) is what percentage of your current budget is allocated with an intention to create a carbon-free sustainable world. If it’s less than 100%, you’ve got work to do.

The recently released Corporate Knights Global 100 Most Sustainable Corporations in the World is a list of companies that are, in the words of Prince Charles, who spoke at this year’s launch, “leading the way by putting sustainability at the heart of their products, services, business models and investments, helping to move the world onto a more sustainable trajectory.”

This year’s Global 100 companies rose to the top of a pool of 8,080 global firms that earn more than $1 billion a year, based on rigorous assessment of 24 indicators, including percentage of taxes paid and percentage of revenue and new investments aligned with a sustainable economy. Several new performance indicators reflect social concerns highlighted by both the pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement, including providing paid sick leave and executive and board racial diversity.

On average, one-third of new investments on the part of Global 100 companies are clean, in contrast to less than one-quarter for their peers, while the percentage of Global 100 companies that offer at least 10 days of paid sick leave (86%) is more than double that of their peer benchmark, the MSCI All Country World Index (41%).

Global 100 companies also earned on average 41% of their revenues from products or services aligned with the UN Sustainable Development Goals, compared to just 8% for their peers.

But none of this would have legs if the good guys weren’t also faring well financially. On this score, the Global 100, which is calculated as an index, handily outperformed its MSCI ACWI peers by 10% over the last year, and 43% since the Global 100 index was launched in 2005.

What is needed now is for the rest of the business world, most importantly the big-money investors who have been sitting on the sidelines, to also lean into this more civilized form of sustainable capitalism.

Encouragingly, the largest pension fund in Ontario, the $205 billion Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan, recently committed to achieving net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. This marks a stark contrast to the Canada Pension Plan, which has no such target and has been singled out for its “troubling incrementalism” by Osgoode Hall pension scholars – while forgoing $6 billion in returns as a result of its fossil fuel investments over the past 10 years, according to Corporate Knights analysis of its equities portfolio.

But now that BlackRock, the largest investor in the world, with a whopping $8.7 trillion under management, has jumped on the net-zero-emissions bandwagon, it is only a matter of time before it becomes the standard, placing a 100% sustainable and zero-carbon economy within our grasp.

The good news for our species is that the forces of pride and profit have shifted in favour of those on the right side of climate history, with shame and economic shambles awaiting those who cling to the wrong side.

Just four of the 13 Canadian companies on the Global 100 have committed to align their businesses with net-zero science-based targets, compared to more than half of Global 100 companies in general, though there is still time for them to get on board in the lead-up to global climate talks this fall in Glasgow.

With the sun shining on climate solutions, companies are free at last to shed their carbon cloaks.

A version of this article appears in the Winter Issue of Corporate Knights as well as the Toronto Star.

Toby Heaps is the CEO and editor-in-chief of Corporate Knights.

The post Editor’s Note: Time to go all in on the zero carbon economy appeared first on Corporate Knights.

Two of Uncle David’s axioms replay in my head on a regular basis:

“It’s a losing battle, but then those are the only ones worth fighting.”

“Never underestimate the ability of powerful people to justify their actions.”

When we look at the past 50 years, from the Vietnam War to our upside-down tax system (where those who have the most often pay the least in terms of their effective rates), it’s hard to argue, on the whole, that he was wrong.

But it’s also fair to say we are no longer living in usual times. The COVID crisis is a reminder of the power of civilization to rapidly address existential challenges when we flex our collective muscle.

The pandemic pause has allowed room to reflect on the kind of society we want. Do we want to continue our zombie-like march toward torching the only home we have? Is it really inevitable that we must continue to prop up the mighty with tax giveaways and handouts while we undervalue the vulnerable people and planet that we need the most?

By 2030, Canada could create more than five million quality job-years of employment by greening the power grid, electrifying transport and upgrading our homes and workplaces to be more comfortable, flood resilient and cheaper to run, saving Canadians $39 billion per year at the pumps and on heating and power bills by 2030 (in today’s dollars). We could also help protect the livelihoods of many others, including by supporting farmers to adopt practices and technologies for restoring the soil while paying them fairly for the ecosystem services they provide, paying young people fairly to plant billions of trees, and supporting Indigenous communities as sustainable economy leaders.

By 2030, we could own large parts of the clean-economy podium. We have all the ingredients to create Canadian champions in fast-growing industries of the future, including lightweight bitumen-based carbon fibres, renewable jet fuels, green hydrogen, batteries and electric vehicles (see our green economy vision board on p. 34).

In the wake of the COVID crisis, this is all within reach if we choose to build back better by making these job-rich themes a priority in the federal government’s stimulus and recovery packages.

The people who control the budgets will ask, how can we afford it? An equally valid question is how can we afford not to do it?

A big part of the explanation is traceable to Uncle David’s two axioms. We cannot afford to listen to the voices that say we just need to get back to doing what we were doing.

There is no going back. Now is the time to move forward.

That, at least, is my hope, but what happens will not be up to me.

It will come down to the human condition and how it responds to the current crisis. Will we be guided by fear or hope?

On this question, I am reminded of Uncle David again. Two of his sons played roles in the 1963 movie Lord of the Flies, based on the dystopian William Golding novel that reveals the rot of fear that dominates the human condition.

Lord of the Flies was fiction. In real life, it was a different story. In 1965, six restless boys set sail from the South Pacific island of Tonga, were hit by a storm and ended up shipwrecked on a desert island for 15 months. When they were finally found, rather than the dystopian situation Golding envisioned, the boys were getting along just fine, having set up a commune with a food garden, gym, a badminton court, chicken pens and a permanent communally tended fire.

It will also take a community to overcome the forces of the status quo.

Some have been dismissive of the idea of a just green recovery.

But they may be missing the point. The just part of a green recovery is not an add-on, but an essential condition for creating the big-tent coalition required to dislodge the forces of inertia. As a practical matter, it’s hard to see how the current “shecession” (women are bearing the brunt of the recession) gets addressed without some radical improvements in supports for affordable childcare, greatly improved eldercare and a living wage.

The best chance we have for the forces of hope to prevail is by marrying the green and just fires that burn bright in all our bellies, from which hope springs eternal.

Toby Heaps is the editor-in-chief and co-founder of Corporate Knights. 

The post Editor’s note: Lighting a path to the world we want appeared first on Corporate Knights.