The effort comes as transit agencies in Canada’s largest cities have either implemented or are considering similar restrictions on using public transit to advertise for Big Oil or related industries. Montreal’s transit agency, the Société de transport de Montréal, has indicated that it intends to ban misleading fossil fuel advertising. Toronto’s proposal would potentially remain open to ads that align with the city’s net-zero goals and don’t run afoul of new federal anti-greenwashing regulations.

In September, DeSmog reported that Toronto City Councillor Dianne Saxe had introduced a motion proposing to restrict false and misleading advertising from oil and gas lobby groups on public transit. The motion did not advocate for a full ban on all fossil fuel ads.

“Toronto’s decision to limit fossil fuel advertising is a landmark win for public health and climate action,” said Melissa Lem, a family physician and president of the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment (CAPE), in a statement. “As physicians, we’ve long recognized that fossil fuel pollution, like tobacco smoke, poses severe health risks to our communities – especially to children and other vulnerable populations.”

Pushing back against false claims by Big Oil

The new limits come on the heels of federal anti-greenwashing regulations that aim to stem the tide of misinformation produced by Canada’s fossil fuel sector and its lobbyists. They also follow a series of high-profile advertising campaigns launched by the oil and gas industry. 

Pathways Alliance, a consortia of Canadian oil sands producers, has been the most visible, with a comprehensive media blitz involving traditional print and broadcast advertising, advertorials, sponsorship and the use of public transit infrastructure – including buses and streetcars – that suggests they are taking an active role in reducing emissions. 

In fact, the Pathways Alliance is principally interested in developing a $16.5-billion carbon capture and sequestration project, as well as a 400-kilometre carbon dioxide pipeline to serve about 20 different tar sands production facilities.

Critics of the project, and carbon capture more broadly, argue that carbon capture overpromises and consistently under-delivers on its alleged environmental advantages. DeSmog previously reported that Pathways paid Google to redirect web searches on environmental and climate-change topics to its website, and further paid Google to redirect web searches specifically on the subject of greenwashing. When new anti-greenwashing regulations came into effect in Canada earlier this year, Pathways removed all content from its website.

Councillor Saxe specifically mentioned both Pathways Alliance and Canada Proud as two lobby groups the Toronto Transit Commission should cease advertising.

This bold move signals the end of unchecked fossil fuel advertising and positions Toronto at the forefront of a global shift.

—Melissa Lem, president of the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment

In reaction to the Pathways “Let’s clear the air” campaign, three Canadian environmental groups complained to the Competition Bureau in the spring of 2023, arguing that the campaign was misleading the public. The Competition Bureau, an independent Canadian law-enforcement agency tasked with protecting consumers and promoting competition, agreed to launch a still-ongoing investigation.

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In August 2023, DeSmog reported that Montreal’s bike share program, Bixi, had decided to pull ads for the Pathways Alliance. Pathways had also been advertising on Montreal bus shelters at the time, as well as using buses in Vancouver and streetcars in Toronto as mobile billboards. They featured slogans such as “Our net zero plan is in motion.”

In late 2023 and early 2024, ad campaigns by the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers and Canada Proud (an allegedly grassroots pro-oil lobby group) were spotted on public buildings throughout the Canadian capital of Ottawa. Ads by these groups have promoted claims that Canadian oil and gas resources are either in high demand or will reduce global emissions.

These high-profile campaigns, in addition to the campaign by Pathways Alliance, led various environmental groups in Ottawa to propose similar bans on fossil fuel advertising. Ad Standards Canada later determined that some of those Ottawa ads by Canada Action, particularly those that argued that Canadian exports of liquefied natural gas would reduce emissions globally, were misleading and amounted to greenwashing.

Mounting a defence against greenwashing

Pressure to crack down on fossil-fuel-advocacy advertising and greenwashing has been ramping up steadily over the past year in Canada. In February, DeSmog reported that long-serving Member of Parliament Charlie Angus proposed a private member’s bill that would ban misleading fossil fuel advertising.

Angus’s proposal was in response to the aforementioned ad campaigns by Pathways and Canada Action. His proposal was further modelled on anti-tobacco-advertising legislation passed in Canada in the 1990s. That proposal wasn’t passed but resulted in fossil fuel advocates spreading misinformation about it. Angus’s office was subsequently inundated with death threats. 

In June, Bill C-59 – another government effort to crack down on greenwashing – became law. Though mischaracterized as a ban on fossil fuel advertising, the new regulations in fact require environmental claims to be backed up with evidence. This prompted tar sands producers and industry lobbyists to scrub content from their websites, including their own environmental goals. 

Oil advocates, including the former and current environment ministers of the Canadian province of Alberta, continue spreading misinformation that the anti-greenwashing laws are part of a broad conspiracy to silence the fossil fuel sector.

“This bold move signals the end of unchecked fossil fuel advertising and positions Toronto at the forefront of a global shift,” CAPE’s Lem said of the Montreal and Toronto developments. “Toronto is clearing the air of both pollution and misleading propaganda, setting a powerful precedent for cities nationwide and globally, moving us toward a healthier, more sustainable future for all people in Canada.”

This article was first published on DeSmog. It has been edited to conform with Corporate Knights style. Read the original story here. 

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For all that, Montreal struggles to meet its ambitious carbon reduction targets, says Blaise Rémillard, manager of planning and mobility at Conseil régional de l’environnement de Montréal (CRE Montréal), an environmental watchdog group. “We have a lot of good plans and a lot of good targets,” he says. But Montreal’s carbon has climbed since the pandemic, and the prospect for hitting the 2030 mark – 55% below 1990 levels – seems poor. “We don’t really know how we can do a reduction of about one-third of emissions within the next five years.”

The City of Toronto also has an expansive net-zero plan, dubbed TransformTO, as well as one of North America’s few municipal policies (the Toronto Green Standard) designed to push builders to drive energy efficiency beyond the low bar in the Ontario Building Code. But it suffers from the same dilemma. TransformTO, says Sarah Buchanan, campaigns director at the Toronto Environmental Alliance, “still doesn’t have the energy, funding and oomph behind it to make it do what council committed to.” Case in point: city council finally approved, but has not yet allocated funding for, a waterfront LRT meant to provide transit access to existing and planned high-density developments on Toronto’s de-industrialized port lands.

A few other cities have fared better when it comes to putting their money where their mouths are. Halifax Regional Municipality last year imposed a climate change tax as a pillar of its broader sustainability strategy, dubbed HalifACT. “At the time, it was the only one of its kind across Canada, and that had some really contentious public support,” says Kortney Dunsby, sustainable cities co-ordinator at the Ecology Action Centre in Halifax. The funding has gone toward investments such as building retrofits.

However, recent population growth and housing price spikes in the Halifax region appear to be driving sprawl as developers snap up cheap land along the region’s edges, with little resistance from the municipality and little in the way of transit investment to service those emerging communities. “Greenfield development [i.e., building projects on completely undeveloped land, such as farmers’ fields] is becoming a conversation, which is sometimes at odds with our climate plan,” observes Ahsan Habib, a professor at Dalhousie University and director of the Dalhousie Transportation Collaboratory.

The problem with city climate plans

As Canada has become more urbanized, greenhouse gas emissions from Canadian urban communities have declined by 17% from 1990 levels. Meanwhile, emissions from the rural economy – heavy industry, mining, oil and gas, agriculture and intercity transport – have increased by 30% over the same period. Since 2005, moreover, urban emissions have fallen by more than a quarter, while rural emissions from those same sectors have remained stable. Both statistics show that cities are driving Canada’s progress toward its 2030 targets.

Still, there’s a chasm between what municipal climate plans call for and what they actually deliver, and that fact of urban life is not new. Sustainability consultant Jeb Brugmann, the founder of Resilient Cities Catalyst, describes it as “the implementation gap,” adding that this type of shortcoming stems from the fact that municipal climate strategies originally took hold among planners. “Part of the planning conceit,” he says, “is that if you do planning, somehow it triggers implementation.” In his experience, climate plans falter because city officials don’t follow through by then doing the hard work of hacking through the Gordian knot of regulatory and cultural obstacles to change.

Others point out that these strategies may do little more than reinforce actions cities were already taking. A decade ago, then–McGill University geographer Adam Millard-Ball did a deep dive into the climate plans and policies for 600 U.S. cities and concluded that in most cases, they simply reflected the prevailing political preferences of individual cities, and spelled out actions that would have likely happened with or without an overarching strategy. 

“Cities with climate plans have had far greater success in implementing strategies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions than their counterparts without such plans,” he wrote in the Journal of Urban Economics. “They have more green buildings, spend more on pedestrian and bicycle infrastructure, and have implemented more programs to divert waste from methane-generating landfills. I find little evidence, however, that climate plans play any causal role in this success.” 

Part of the explanation for the buyer’s regret with climate plans can be found in the tangle of overlapping jurisdictions that touch the climate file and make it exceedingly difficult for cities to drive ahead with solutions. In Montreal, mobility-related emissions have remained stubbornly high because the province continues to pour money into highways. While EV adoption is impressive thanks to subsidies and the deployment of charging infrastructure (see p. 38), EV owners will drive instead of taking transit, which remains a far more climate-friendly solution. 

As for energy, Montrealers rely in part on cheap natural gas because Hydro-Québec has long exported the province’s surplus hydro power and relied instead on “peaker plants.” (Even though 94% of the province’s electricity capacity is hydroelectric, fossil fuels account for more than half of all the energy consumed in Quebec.) Rémillard describes Quebeckers’ view of natural gas as “complacent.” In Toronto, the city incentivizes builders to disconnect from natural gas, but the provincial government has continued to expand Enbridge’s gas distribution network. 

[TransformTO] still doesn’t have the energy, funding and oomph behind it to make it do what council committed to.

 

– Sarah Buchanan, Toronto Environmental Alliance

What’s more, the story of hobbled city-driven climate mitigation or adaption plans is also a function of regulatory inertia. In most jurisdictions, for example, building codes – that is, minimum standards for fire and structural safety, energy efficiency, et cetera – are set at the provincial or state level, which means municipalities are limited in how effectively they can push developers, using their own permitting systems, to reduce building-related carbon.

Of course, emissions don’t care about administrative borders. Yet administrative borders determine municipal climate action plans, such as transit investment. The result is that suburban areas, which tend to be car-dependent because of sprawl-oriented planning policies made decades ago, may care much less about spending on transit, not necessarily because their mayors and councils are climate dinosaurs, but because transit infrastructure in low-density areas is incredibly expensive.

The analysis becomes even trickier depending on what type of urban carbon we’re choosing to measure. According to a 2020 peer-reviewed study published in the journal Sustainability, city climate strategies typically focus on the production of carbon, via tailpipe emissions, energy generation and so on. But if you widen the focus to include consumption-related carbon – for instance, carbon generated by the manufacture and distribution of consumer goods purchased in the city, everything from food to consumer electronics, and including the supply chains that lead to urban markets – the total is considerably higher. Paradoxically, cities with ambitious climate plans may also be wealthier, which means more consumption and thus more carbon.

All of these cross-currents butt up against one of the more dominant strains of climate politics, which is that global cities and their mayors have established themselves at the vanguard of carbon reduction, often in response to the lack of effective policy from national governments. Organizations like the C40, an international network of sustainability-minded cities, work hard to promote ambitious strategies, pilot projects and technologies that have moved the needle in various metropolitan areas. 

Tough questions hover around the achievability of these urban sustainability goals that depend primarily on government investments but lack proper enforcement mechanisms and penalties. Some cities are beginning to think in those terms. At the Toronto Environmental Alliance, Buchanan points out that the City of Toronto is looking at a proposal to compel the owners of larger commercial structures to disclose their carbon consumption – a figure that, theoretically, might cause tenants to think twice about energy-inefficient buildings and the unnecessarily high energy costs they may incur in their lease arrangements. Eventually, she adds, landlords may face fines or fees for failing to upgrade their buildings, but city council hasn’t signed off yet on such a move.

There’s evidence from elsewhere that tougher policies do work. In New York City, for example, Local Law 97, which was enacted in 2019 and comes into effect this year, sets emissions caps on buildings of a certain size, with non-compliant landlords facing hefty fines. The regulation applies to 50,000 properties that exceed 25,000 square feet in total area. City officials say the vast majority of landlords have already moved to comply with the 2024 target reduction, but they’ll have to push even further to satisfy the 2030 benchmark (40% reductions).

The other conundrum is whether overly broad city climate plans become bureaucratically unmanageable because of their breadth of ambition – the “too much body/not enough blanket” problem. Asked to identify the most impactful municipal climate policy, the Ecology Action Centre’s Dunsby replies, “In planning, we call these wicked planning problems.” Halifax’s housing crisis isn’t unique to this city, she adds, “but I do think that focusing housing development in already serviced areas and focusing on trying to build out truly complete communities – mixed-use, walkable, transit-oriented development – would truly help to reduce our community-scale emissions.”

A large body of evidence confirms that land-use planning and development that drives density is, in fact, among the most effective ways to cut urban emissions. In a paper published this spring in the journal Cities, an American-Mexican team of geographers scrutinized land-use regulation in 431 urban areas in 40 countries. “Our findings confirm that dense, compact urban areas, with built-up downtowns and shorter roadway segments, have lower per capita carbon emissions,” they concluded, adding that restrictions on intensification, such as the protection of low-rise neighbourhoods, fuels sprawl and all the carbon that sprawl brings.

But both Buchanan and Dunsby caution against the notion that there’s a silver bullet when it comes to decarbonizing cities. “The investment in accelerating housing development and density has to come at the same time as investing in really high-functioning, efficient and reliable transit systems,” Dunsby says.

[Burnaby’s Metrotown is] a very unique hub. That ain’t no 15-minute city. That’s a five-minute city.

 

– Jeb Brugmann, founder, Resilient Cities Catalyst

Indeed, Ahsan Habib and many other climate-conscious planners argue that cities need to make decisions on how they grow and develop in lockstep with investments in green transportation infrastructure. “Whenever we are growing certain parts of the city, do we have a plan in place to move those people [and] achieve certain target modal splits [i.e., the proportion of people who travel by transit, bike or foot as opposed to cars]? If we do that, there is no chicken-and-egg problem.”

Brugmann points out that in some cities, strong political leaders have broken down silos that too often stand in the way of urban climate action. He cites the case of Curitiba, Brazil, where a long-serving mayor with no patience for official plans used his power to build an extensive bus rapid-transit network, a formula now in use in many large Latin American cities. 

He also cites examples closer to home, such as Metro Vancouver, where far-sighted planning and investment led, over three decades, to high-density development in the West End and impressive intensification around the expanding SkyTrain network. Brugmann lived for several months in Metrotown – a dense, transit-oriented community in Burnaby that’s grown up over the past two decades or so and seems to be delivering on the vision of a compact, pedestrian-friendly community connected to the region by transit. “It’s a very unique hub,” he says. “I’m telling you, that ain’t no 15-minute city. That’s a five-minute city.”

For our spring issue, Corporate Knights looks at a handful of urban indicators – greenhouse gases per capita, tree canopy and EV charging infrastructure – in eight large cities across Canada. Check back here for more city  features from our Spring 2024 issue. 

John Lorinc is a Toronto-based journalist and author specializing in urban issues, business and culture. 

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For the past two decades, we have helped to fan what was once considered the quaint idea of stakeholder capitalism (where companies serve us instead of the other way around) into a full-blown social movement. Today, this sustainable brand of business is the main competitive advantage for many of the world’s leading corporations – as evidenced by the 18-year track record of financial out-performance by Canada’s Best 50 Corporate Citizens and our Global 100 Most Sustainable Corporations Index.

Our formula has been a well-measured recipe of management guru Peter Drucker (“What gets measured gets managed”), two of my forefathers (“Carrots motivate people to act” and “Always respect justice but question authority”) and my late social worker mother (“If you believe in people, anything is possible”).

We have shared (and sometimes force-fed) this recipe with many of the world’s most powerful companies and governments, who listen because they know that our research and reporting cannot be dismissed. After 17 years of pushing the idea of stakeholder capitalism on the Davos crowd from the sidelines, the World Economic Forum adopted our mantra as its credo in 2021.

We also popularized – and in some cases catalyzed – many big ideas that are now central features of our economy: from pricing pollution and putting the money back in people’s pockets, to board diversity requirements, mandatory sustainability reporting and carbon budgets for large funds and companies. We planted the seed to make Toronto a global hub for sustainable finance with 100,000 new jobs and helped spawn the Financial Centres for Sustainability network, launched by the G7 in 2017, as well as Canada’s $8-billion net-zero accelerator to speedup green businesses and jobs.

We took the fight to investors in 2022, offering them a special view into who will own the low-carbon economy of tomorrow, with a unique database showing which companies are plowing the most into green capital expenditures. Earlier this year, we struck a transformational partnership with one of Canada’s largest asset managers (Mackenzie Investments) to share the financial gains of Global 100 companies with the masses in one simple solution that anyone with $20 can invest in.

But on my daily runs with my friend Karim (and now my late mother’s wolf-shepherd Molly), I heard myself increasingly sounding like the “critic” in Teddy Roosevelt’s“The Man in the Arena” speech. I was on the sidelines pointing out “where the doer of deeds could have done them better.” I didn’t like the sound of it and decided I would jump in the political arena with bold ideas – in a few years’ time, when my boys were older.

But then the salt started to sting. I am talking about the excessive salt that the City of Toronto lathers all over the streets in the winter that was burning Molly’s paws, not to mention the billions it costs Torontonians to prematurely replace our corroding cars, shoes and the Gardiner Expressway. When I found out that many other cities, like my home-town Calgary, had long ago found less toxic and more affordable, effective solutions to keep the roads safe, I got a little mad.

When the premier of Ontario threatened to lock Molly and me out of our daily running routine by privatizing one of our most wonderful public spaces, Ontario Place, into a mega spa for millionaires, I set a new course. We could not sit on the sidelines for this once-in-a-generation by-election for the mayor of Toronto. We had to get in the arena together – bringing all my entrepreneurial energy and Molly’s love for, well, everyone.

It may sound strange to run for the highest office of North America’s fourth-largest city alongside a dog (to be clear, I am the human candidate on the ballot and Molly would be Toronto’s first honorary dog mayor, following in the footsteps of Niagara Falls, Ontario, and cities in California, Minnesota and Kentucky),but I believe we make more compassionate decisions with animals around.

Win or lose, I hope Molly and I inspire other unusual suspects to take a chance at stepping into the arena. In the words of Teddy Roosevelt, we will strive to spend our-selves in a worthy cause; and at the worst, if we fail, at least we will fail while daring greatly, so that our place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat

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There are plenty of reasons for this welcome shift. Indeed, building materials and construction account for 11% of all global emissions. The accumulating evidence suggests that our pre-occupation with operational carbon and energy efficiency (i.e., gas for heating and cooling, high-efficiency furnaces, etc.) may be missing the mark. According to the Canada Green Building Council embodied carbon accounts for a whopping 90% of a new building’s emissions over a three-decade span.  

Research carried out at the University of Toronto by a group led by architect Kelly Doran has shown that underground parking garages and concrete foundations are among the major culprits, accounting in some cases for 80% of the carbon expended on a given project over its lifetime.  

“That’s a really big powerful number in terms of how we are going to tackle climate change and how are we going to address emissions from buildings,” says Shayna Stott, a senior City of Toronto planner.  

Toronto City Council earlier this month took a significant step towards reducing embodied carbon in new buildings with a new policy that offers cash incentives – from $2,400 to almost $5,300 per apartment, depending on size – for builders who voluntarily limit the embodied carbon in their projects to a series of caps established for various categories of structures. The move, which will be embedded in Version 4 of Toronto Green Standard, comes less than a year after Council voted to eliminate parking minimums for new condos and rental buildings – a decision that will result in smaller garages and less concrete consumption.  

“We were all focused for a long time on the operational energy,” says Jane Welsh, Toronto’s environmental policy project manager. “Understanding the materials is very important.”  

The new embodied carbon caps – 250 kgCO2e/m2 and 350 kgCO2e/m2 – reflect testing done by the U of T team, which benchmarked about 550 buildings of various sizes and uses and estimated the life cycle carbon for each. The caps are set at approximately the median for embodied carbon, meaning they’re sufficiently aggressive to generate savings but not out of reach of current approaches. 

A more intensive set of caps is applied to all city projects, as well as the thousands of new rental units planned for city-owned land parcels around Toronto. Like B.C.’s Step Code, the Toronto Green Standard is revised regularly, with each so-called tier becoming progressively more stringent; Tier 1 is mandatory. “We will start working later this fall and into the spring [on Version 5],” says Welsh. “We’ll be looking at whether we can move [the embodied carbon caps] into Tier 1, which would be required.” 

That’s a really big powerful number in terms of how we are going to tackle climate change and how are we going to address emissions from buildings.

 

– Shayna Stott, City of Toronto planner

 

Incentivized caps, of course, are only half the picture. The other piece of this puzzle is finding techniques for building that uses less carbon. One obvious candidate, now used increasingly frequently, is tall timber. Modular construction – with building elements, including units themselves – pre-made in a factory and then shipped for assembly to the building site – is another.  

But experts such as Ted Kesik, a U of T engineering professor and an authority on building codes, points out that many projects today are over-built and simply consume a redundant amount of reinforced concrete, largely because it’s inexpensive. He says eight-inch shear walls, which are building code compliant, have gradually expanded to 10 or 12 inches, while sloppy architecture results in the use of massive concrete-and-steel transfer beams.  

Besides dialing back on unnecessary concrete, developers can alter the embodied carbon of their projects by using different forms of cladding, which are commercially available, and low-carbon insulation. “We’re saying we can do more with less and buildings would be just as safe,” says Kesik. But, to get there, he adds, “we’ll have to see a bit of a cultural change.”   

Beyond such moves, developers and their contractors can also use a range of pre-fabricated concrete panels that have voids, which mean they weigh less, or source so-called green concrete, which is made with recycled ingredients, such as waste fly ash from steel plants. 

Kesik adds that the city’s new embodied carbon caps are “very generous” and points out that it’s entirely possible to achieve levels under 200 kgCO2e/m2 using mass timber. 

We’re saying we can do more with less and buildings would be just as safe.

 

– Ted Kesik, U of T engineering professor

Toronto’s move puts it in a growing class of cities, regions and governments that have or are making similar efforts to regulate and push down embodied carbon, among them Vancouver and California. Canada’s federal government has indicated it will require a 30% reduction of embodied carbon in the structural materials of new public buildings as of 2025, according to policy research conducted last year for the Ontario government by U of T, The Atmospheric Fund, the City of Toronto and Mantle Developments. 

New York City, in turn, has employed caps in a more hard-nosed way, imposing a firm emissions cap on all buildings over 25,000 sq.-ft., a collection of some 50,000 structures. The regulation, passed in 2019 and known as Local Law 97, doesn’t bother with carrots: property owners that don’t comply get fined. 

While efforts to drive down building-related emissions also depend heavily on planning factors, such as intensification, and transportation policies that provide alternatives to private vehicles, the important detail in the new embodied carbon policy is the embodied carbon assessments developers will have to undertake to represent a complete accounting. It’s no longer just a case of measuring whether a building is running its HVAC efficiently or if it checks off boxes on a LEED certification program. 

The question now is whether the building industry will take up the challenge. Welsh and Stott say they’re seeing some interest and a more diverse set of builders looking to find out about whether they can take advantage of the incentives. Those signals, says Stott, are “indicative of the commitments to address climate change across the industry, as well as how the program supports making those decisions to get there.” 

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The number of people in attendance has grown substantially since 2008, which was the last time the former U.S. vice-president conducted his training session in Canada. But what stood out most – at least to those who remember the 2008 sessions – is that the content of Gore’s latest presentation is more hopeful in tone and direction.

Seven years ago, they say, more than 95 per cent focused on the climate problem – rising temperatures and ocean levels, melting glaciers, the increased frequency and intensity of droughts, heat waves, flooding, forest fires; and how all of this threatened public health, food and water supply, and as a result global stability.

“The presentation now is a lot more solutions-based compared to 2008 when I was trained,” says Corrina Serda, 19, who became a certified presenter at the age of 11. Until recently, that made this Port Elgin resident the youngest person to do so. Since then, she has given more than 180 presentations across Ontario to an estimated 60,000 people. “He (Gore) has shifted more from the science and the problems to the solutions,” she says. “People are really, really excited. They’re just really energized.”

It’s not that Gore doesn’t talk about the bad stuff. That still represents about half of the presentation, and it’s far from uplifting and energizing.

As he details the latest science explaining what’s happening to our planet, Gore’s famous slideshow reminds us of the devastation caused by Superstorm Sandy in the U.S. northeast, the 2013 floods in Toronto, Calgary and Houston. We see the droughts that are killing crops and people from California to Pakistan, not to mention melting roads in India. He shares jaw-dropping images of forest fires in B.C., Saskatchewan and Russia.

A 36-degree C day in Alaska in June? An 18-degree C day in Antarctica in March? These are crazy, unprecedented numbers, he says.

He shows highways crumbling, vehicles and houses floating down swelled rivers, mudslides that have buried villages, and bridges completely destroyed by violently flowing water. “The structures we built were designed for a different era,” says Gore. “And it’s the poor who have the least ability to recover and are hit hardest.”

Gore gives us a high-level overview of what’s going on. “Warmer air can hold more water vapour,” he says, explaining that each degree F of increase expands how much water the air can hold by 7 per cent. The air is soaking up more water from lakes and oceans, but also from soil. When that rain (or snow) falls, it falls faster and harder than before. “When downpours occur, they’re bigger on average now,” he adds.

At the same time, when that moisture is pulled from soil and dumped somewhere else, it creates the conditions in some places for persistent drought and longer wildfire seasons. “In Canada the average amount (of forest) burned has doubled since the 1970s. We attribute this, and I’ll be quite clear, to human-caused climate change,” Gore says.

How this all impacts global security is perhaps the most disturbing. Some diseases spread. Food supply is disrupted and prices spike when drought and floods destroy crops and livestock, while water scarcity results when supplies dry up or get contaminated by flooding. Uprisings and conflict in India, Tunisia and Syria, among other countries, have all to some extent been preceded by food riots or water disputes.

“The impact of climate on agriculture is something we’re going to hear a lot more about,” Gore warns, pointing to research that shows how a 1 degree temperature increase can reduce wheat yields by 20 per cent by making water-starved crops vulnerable to pests and disease. “As temperatures rise, people, crops, energy systems, business and industry, animals, all need more water.”

As if that’s not enough to sour the milk in your morning corn flakes, Gore reminds us of some of the feedback loops that pose serious threats. For example, methane gas leaking from melting permafrost in Arctic tundra, an extensively studied area where “measurements are not comforting,” he says, rolling a video of scientists on a frozen Siberian lake poking a hole in the ice and lighting the emerging methane gas on fire. A torch-like flame shoots out of the hole and the scientists jump back in alarm.

Remember those mysteriously massive craters discovered last year in northern Russia? Turns out they were created by underground explosions, now believed to be the buildup of methane gas caused by warming of the permafrost, Gore explains.

Forest fires happening elsewhere aren’t helping. They’re dropping soot on snow and ice, creating a dark surface and stimulating the growth of dark algae that absorb more energy (heat) from the sun. This only accelerates melting.

“Greenland is now melting significantly faster than had been predicted,” Gore says. “We’re seeing an increased melting rate in Antarctica also.”

Down, But Not Doomed

So, you might ask yourself: Where’s the hope?

Gore admits the impacts we’re witnessing worldwide and what the science is telling us can be deflating. “It’s important to deal with the heaviness of these issues,” he tells the audience. At the same time, he adds, “You cannot allow yourself to feel despair. It’s pointless. But we have work to do. The truth is some damage is going to take place. It’s unavoidable.”

What we’re fighting to do now is limit that damage so that it’s less difficult to manage and adapt to, he explains. “The answer is pretty clear. We’ve got work to do. We can win this, but we have to be clear-eyed about what the situation is.”

From there, he starts to lift the audience, like a disc jockey playing the crowd. This is where Al Gore 2015 stands apart from Al Gore 2008.

• Pope Francis, he says, is “doing something incredible” by raising awareness and pushing for serious action.

• China, worried about political unrest because of air pollution that is reducing average life expectancy, is putting a price on carbon, tightening restrictions on coal power, and investing heavily in clean energy.

• Professional groups – from doctors to firefighters – are speaking out and demanding strong action.

• Investors, and financial authorities like the Bank of England, are waking up to the financial risks of a carbon bubble destined to burst, leading to billions of dollars of fossil-fuel assets becoming stranded. More university endowments, churches, municipalities and pension funds are divesting from fossil fuels.

• The market for green bonds is taking off, resulting in tens of billions of dollars flowing to climate-friendly infrastructure and energy projects.

• Investment in energy efficiency and smart grid modernization is way up. Cities large and small around the world are committing to becoming 100 per cent renewable within the next decade.

Gore then shows a compelling slide of coal plants in the United States that have been retired or are planned for retirement, as well as new coal plants that have been proposed but have since been cancelled. Expressed as dots on a map, there are too many of them to count.

On the topic of renewable energy, and particularly the falling cost of solar, Gore gets visibly excited. He tells us that the amount of wind power generation is 12 times larger than what experts predicted back in 2000. Solar is 62 times larger.

He throws up a line chart showing how quickly solar power is taking off. “This is an exponential curve,” he says. “When you see something like this in technology, just stand back, because it’s going to continue… solar is about to explode worldwide.”

The reason, of course, is how quickly solar costs have fallen. In many parts of the world, solar power has achieved grid parity – meaning it’s no more expensive than purchasing power off the grid. A research report from Deutsche Bank earlier this year concluded that 47 out of 50 U.S. states will cross the grid-parity barrier by 2016.

Just last week, it was reported that a Nevada utility controlled by investment icon Warren Buffett struck a long-term power purchase agreement (PPA) with First Solar that will see it get solar electricity at about 4 cents per kilowatt-hour, easily competitive with both coal and natural gas and far less expensive than nuclear. On that deal, a First Solar spokesperson said the trend in solar costs speaks for itself: “We expect to see more PPAs pricing out at comparable levels.”

“Nobody thought it would be possible in this timeframe, but it’s happening right before our eyes,” says Gore, pointing to the phenomenal growth of solar development in the U.S. alone. “This is really a dramatic change that should give us cause for joy and celebration, not hopelessness and despair. We’re going to win this. We just have to speed up the victory.”

To explain why we’re at an inflection point for solar and other renewables, Gore uses the analogy of how an ice cube becomes water when the temperature shifts from zero to just 1 degree C. Prior to grid parity, the solar market was the ice cube and capital into that market was frozen. With grid parity, the market suddenly melts and becomes liquid, causing capital to flow quite easily and readily.

And energy storage technologies are heading in the same direction, he says, with costs having fallen 90 per cent over the past 20 years and expected to be cut in half again over the next two years.

Together – solar plus storage – is a powerful combination that will challenge all forms of thermal power generation, from coal and natural gas to nuclear. “This is a big deal, and it’s a cause for great hope… the age of renewables is beginning.”

Near the end of his presentation, Gore gives a final jab to politicians who continue to deny and delay when it comes to climate action. How do we eliminate fossil fuel subsidies? How do we put a price on carbon in markets? “The way to do it is to put a price on denial in politics,” he says to much applause.

His final message to the group: “Don’t give up.”

For certified presenters such as Corrina Serda, who are at the gathering to act as mentors to future presenters, there’s no sign of giving up. Quite the opposite, in fact. Not only are the training sessions attracting more people, the mix of participants is getting younger.

Serda says she is most impressed that out of the 600 people attending the Toronto training session, about 100 of them – or 17 per cent – are 25 years old or younger. Just this year there have been a few nine year olds trained.

“That to me is pretty inspiring and amazing,” Serda says. “I know too many people my age who are a little cynical, so I’m always happy to see young people who are hopeful about the future.”

Compared to 2008, hope is definitely in the air. Adds Serda, “I feel more optimistic, personally.”

The post The changing tone of Al Gore’s message, and its importance appeared first on Corporate Knights.

Of the 5,537,240 square feet of green roofs installed in 2014, Toronto contributed about 775,000 square feet – or about 14 per cent of the total. Put another way, the area coverage of Toronto installations last year exceeded the combined efforts of Chicago and New York City, which ranked fourth and fifth place, respectively.

Washington, D.C., was the clear leader, installing about 1.2 million square feet, or 22 per cent of the total.

Toronto’s performance made it the first Canadian city to rank among the top five. “The Toronto Green Roof by-law of 2009 requiring green roofs on most new buildings has resulted in the permitting of more than 2 million square feet of green roofs,” the association said.

An increasing number of metropolitan areas are promoting green roofs because of the many benefits they bring, including improved urban air quality, reduction in the heat island effect in cities, improved stormwater management, and job creation.

Green rooftops are also known to increase city biodiversity and offer a way to grow herbs and vegetables for local use.

One trend that became clear in this year’s report is that the business community is getting serious about green roofs. “In a significant shift from the previous year, more square feet were installed on private projects than public,” the association said.

The one major caveat to the report, however, is that it’s a limited sample of North American cities. The survey data used to capture market activity comes only from Green Roofs for Healthy Cities members, and of those members only 27 of 89 supplied data.

“We estimate that the data in this report generally understates the market activity by anywhere from 25 to 50 per cent given that not all firms in the industry are members of GRHC and not all members are able, or willing, to participate in the annual survey,” it says.

“Nonetheless, the data does provide important insights into the composition of the industry.”

Given that cities that have something to brag about tend to be the ones that eagerly report data, there’s a good chance the top five identified in this report are an accurate reflection of the market leaders.

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