Just maybe, however, 2020 will go down as the year we started getting things right. Science broke all speed records for developing effective vaccines. The United States elected a president with the greenest agenda ever. Solar emerged as the least expensive energy source in history. And more political and business leaders are recognizing that society’s vulnerability to COVID-19 is rooted in longstanding inequities and harmful behaviours that are finally being addressed.

All these trends, unexpectedly, helped make 2020 a banner year for Corporate Knights – and for anyone who cares about sustainability and social justice. As we continued our reporting and advocacy, we’ve seen several major advances this year:

• Our Building Back Better roundtable series last spring – masterfully moderated by the unflappable Diana Fox Carney – brought together a host of leaders in business, labour, science and government to explore innovative ways to spark a “green recovery.” The ideas put forth by our numerous experts – in energy, manufacturing, agriculture, construction, transportation and so much more – coalesced into an ambitious summary report whose proposals were endorsed by business leaders across all major sectors and are now seeping into policy agendas on both sides of the Atlantic. A short video of the Canada we could have by 2030 if we act boldly in the coming months and years can be viewed here.
• This fall we launched a follow-up roundtable series, Building Back Better Together, in partnership with the Embassy of the Federal Republic of Germany in Canada. This alliance demonstrates the growing international interest in collaborating on climate issues, and we can’t wait to see how this trend grows as the United States rejoins the Paris Climate Agreement. 
• To commemorate the 50th anniversary of Earth Day, we worked with Earth Day Canada and the Earth Day Initiative in the U.S. to produce the first-ever Green 50: Top business moves that helped the planet. Our list celebrated such game-changing events as Toyota’s launch of the first mass-produced hybrid car and Ontario’s decision to ban coal-fired power plants (still the world’s single largest GHG-reduction measure). Our goal parallelled that of Earth Day itself, as described to us by the movement’s founder, Denis Hayes: “To try to create enough pressure on governments and companies around the world to be aggressive in their [climate action] leadership.”
• The lockdown also opened a door for us to launch virtual Corporate Knights roundtables, building up a community of more than 5,000 engaged citizens, business leaders and public policy leaders who invested thousands of hours to explore and define the “angel in the details” of what it will take to build back better as we emerge from the pandemic pause. This year’s roundtables culminated in a fireside chat featuring Margaret Atwood, Sheila Watt-Cloutier, and David Suzuki, who offered a rousing call to action to take a moonshot at being the first to land a net-zero-emissions economy. 

Enough about us. I’d like to thank you for your support of Corporate Knights. Your engagement with our magazine, our events, our website and YouTube channel, and with our partners and advertisers is what enables us to go out every day and fight for sustainability and prosperity for Canada, the world and our children’s children. As the race to a zero-emissions economy speeds up and the climate threat grows, the perspective that government and science and business are all in this together is more timely and relevant than ever. We thank you for your support in 2020 and look forward to a more prosperous 2021 – the year we all begin to Build Back Better.

Happy New Year,

Toby Heaps

Founder and Publisher, Corporate Knights

The post My favourite year appeared first on Corporate Knights.

Climate change and the eventual draconian measures to keep it under control – declining country-assigned population caps, for one – would drive the narrative through characters who, in an increasingly carbon-constrained world, suddenly and unexpectedly found themselves among society’s most vulnerable.

Working title: Cap and Cull.

Why venture into fiction? It seemed to me like a better way to educate people about an otherwise complex – and I expect for most – boring topic. I tried to do this in my book Mad Like Tesla. The idea there was to lure people into learning about alternative energy technologies and climate challenges by telling the stories of real-world inventors and entrepreneurs doing some pretty inspiring, and arguably wacky, work.

The book did okay, at least by Canadian standards, selling about 5,000 copies. A far cry from the 600,000 sold as part of Margaret Atwood’s Maddaddam Trilogy, or for that matter the 30 million copies of Hunger Games – both books set in a world disrupted and devastated by climate change.

Despite being popular with Tesla and energy nerds like myself, the problem with my book is that it preached largely to the converted. The challenge, and this is where I think good fiction becomes important, is to reach the people not already singing in the choir. That means telling a compelling story. It is through protagonist and antagonist, action, love, suspense, treachery and dare say a dose of hope that historical and scientific facts about climate change, and an informed perspective about its impacts on our future, become more accessible – and palatable – for the masses.

I’m not alone in this thinking. Bernie Bulkin, former chief scientist at oil giant BP, wrote a commentary for Huffington Post in 2013 that spoke to the growing importance of what has come to be known as “cli-fi” – or climate fiction.

“It has seemed to me lately that cli-fi has to be one part of the answer to the problem many of us are trying to solve: How do we engage people more broadly and more deeply on climate change?” he wrote.

The word cli-fi, as far as we know, has been around since climate blogger Dan Bloom coined it. It started to gain traction, however, after writer Scott Thill, reporting for Wired magazine, included it as a keyword in a movie review of The Age of Stupid, a pseudo documentary about of a climate-ravaged world in 2055 and the missteps of humanity that led to it.

Since then, it seems the presence of the cli-fi genre in popular culture has grown, perhaps alongside our collective angst as the real impacts of climate change and the challenges of managing it become clearer. It’s not that eco-apocalypse theme novels are new, but it’s clear those anchored specifically around climate change have been on the rise in recent years.

So much so that B.C.’s Moon Willow Press launched a website in August 2013 called Clifibooks.com (since renamed Eco-fiction.com), which reviews cli-fi novels and maintains a database of such books. Many of those books are aimed at young adults – apropos for our just released youth-themed issue of Corporate Knights. These include Not a Drop to Drink by Mindy McGinnis, Floodland by Marcus Sedgewick and Saci Lloyd’s The Carbon Diaries 2015.

And let’s not forget self-publishing, yet another cultural barometer of the public’s climate angst. Diana Rissetto, a New York-based publicity agent for self-published authors, approached me last November about Declan Milling’s Carbon Black, a cli-fi thriller we review in the most recent issue and which you can find here.

At the time, I asked Rissetto if she’d seen a rise in the number of self-published cli-fi books crossing her desk. “Actually, yes!” she replied, as if surprised by her own answer. “We’ve had three in just the past few months.” Prior to that, she hadn’t seen any.

Film, of course, is also playing a big role. Again, we’ve seen movies in the past that can be interpreted as cli-fi, even though they don’t mention the words climate change. George Miller’s 1979 classic Mad Max and its superior sequel, Road Warrior, are among my favorites. Another (lower quality) example is the 1995 film Waterworld, starring Kevin Costner trying to survive in a world flooded by melting ice caps.

But as a dystopian theme, climate catastrophe seems to be a more popular backdrop these days. The South Korean film Snowpiercer, the blockbuster Interstellar by Christopher Nolan, and Young Ones starring Michael Shannon are recent examples.

To what degree are cli-fi books and movies impacting today’s youth? It’s difficult to say, as one could just as easily ask how much youth are impacting growth of the cli-fi genre.

What’s clear is that today’s teenagers and young adults, as digitally connected as they are, know more than any other generation that the fiction they see in popular culture could well be the reality they inherit. One thing I learned while producing the most recent issue of Corporate Knights is that Millennials are not ducking the challenge.

If there’s going to be a sequel to any cli-fi book or movie, they’re going to create it.

Hopefully, there will be no capping and culling involved.

The post Will the rise of “cli-fi” spur youth into climate action? appeared first on Corporate Knights.