Innholdsfortegnelse for Winter 2021 i Corporate Knights

SMALL NUKES ARE BIG MISTAKE [Re: Ontario Power Generation’s ad promoting the development of small modular nuclear reactors (SMRs)]. These have been falsely touted as a solution to climate change, convincing various levels of government. In fact, SMRs are completely irrelevant to reducing greenhouse gas emissions, largely because they will take a minimum of 10 years, likely much longer, to be up and running, which is far too long to wait to address our climate emergency. Nuclear energy is astronomically expensive, dangerous, unethical and environmentally unsound, with a particular burden placed on First Nations communities (mining disproportionately occurs on First Nations lands). It creates highly toxic radioactive waste, the disposal of which no country has figured out despite nuclear energy being around for many decades. A respected magazine such as…

An outbreak of swine flu in 1998 persuaded Dutch cattle farmer Jaap Korteweg to become a vegetarian. But he still craved the taste of meat, so he worked with chefs, scientists and producers of vegetable protein to develop plant-based foods with the flavour and texture of beef, pork and chicken – but without the cruelty of meat production or its environmental risks (the world’s cattle produce more greenhouse gases than all its automobiles). In 2010, Korteweg opened The Vegetarian Butcher (TVB), a single storefront in the Dutch capital of The Hague, where he says the only thing being slaughtered was prejudice. Since then, his veggie bratwurst, no-chicken chunks, meatless burgers and fish-free eel pies have spread across Europe, winning numerous best-food awards. TVB even finished third in a Dutch newspaper…

After 20 years of fighting income inequality, Toronto-based Social Capital Partners (SCP) thinks it has found a way to move the needle on Canadian prosperity: by reinventing employee ownership. SCP was founded by tech entrepreneur Bill Young, who made two fortunes in the 1990s and has spent 20 years giving away money to boost the prosperity of people who face employment barriers. SCP has gone through three phases: investing directly in social enterprises, developing innovative social-finance tools, and promoting innovative employee-training programs. Now Young and his team are focusing on a new solution: enhancing workers’ capital, rather than income, to increase prosperity and their resilience to economic shocks (say, the next pandemic). How do people accumulate wealth? Usually through financial assets, such as stocks and bonds. After exploring various paths,…

Populism is usually associated with right-wing reactionaries who tend to be hostile to climate action, but the idea of a “progressive,” environmentally oriented variety may not be quite as mad as you think. Here’s why: 1.It (sort of) already exists. Greta Thunberg and other global climate-strike activists might not think of themselves as populists, but they are part of a bottom-up movement that has rapidly sprung to international prominence, not least because it represents the views of people who feel unrepresented by mainstream politics. Significantly, groups such as the Sunrise Movement and Extinction Rebellion remain active despite the pandemic. 2.There’s already a long-standing progressive strand to populist thinking. True, the intellectual influence of this variant of populism probably peaked in France in the 1960s, but the Arab Spring was a…

”Let’s pretend climate change is not a crisis – let’s pretend it’s a war.“ Adapted from our Fireside Stories for the Climate event in December, with panellists Margaret Atwood, David Suzuki and Sheila Watt-Cloutier. The transcript has been condensed and edited. I grew up with the early environmentalists, who in those days were just viewed as harmless cranks. So I have seen the conversation move from the margins to the centre. [Now] people are aware of the climate crisis, where back in the 1950s they were not. Then came the Club of Rome [Climate Emergency Plan] in 1972, saying if we keep going down this path, horrible things will happen. But again, we did not go down the preferable path. Each time we’ve missed that turnoff the possibilities of rectifying…

”Private finance can bend the arc of history towards climate justice.“ In one year’s time, countries, companies and communities will try to launch the sustainable revolution, to put the market into service of humanity and once again have society’s values drive value. Over my lifetime, the population of mammals, birds, fish, reptiles and amphibians is estimated to have fallen by 70%. Perhaps because they were not formally, financially valued, these losses were initially downplayed, and their cause was treated as an issue for another day. But now the effects of climate change are beginning to affect assets that have a market price, making the scale of the looming calamity more tangible. With the COVID crisis exposing the tragic folly of undervaluing resilience and ignoring systemic risk, society is beginning to…

When Elon Musk was a teenager living in Montreal, he ran an experiment to see if he could survive on a dollar-a-day food budget for a month. The thinking being if he could live on almost nothing, he could afford to risk everything. Even if he failed spectacularly, he would always be able to scrounge up $30 to avoid going hungry. 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. He’s…

”COVID is a reminder of our basic animal nature and the difficulty humans have prioritizing the wisest choices.“ When human beings evolved in Africa 150,000 years ago, we were not very impressive compared to the huge herds of other mammals around us. I’m sure none of them looked at us – upright, furless apes – in terror, because our great survival trait was not obvious: a massive brain that was observant, curious and creative, with a great memory. That organ invented a concept none of the other creatures had – the future – and realized we could affect that future by what we do in the present. By looking ahead, we were able to, using our experience and observation, anticipate hazards or favourable possibilities and thus deliberately choose to avoid…

”When people are preoccupied with meeting their basic needs, they have very little bandwidth to be climate allies.“ This piece has been adapted from a Q&A between Corporate Knights and Paul. The full conversation is on the Corporate Knights TV YouTube channel. Growing up in Toronto and coming from a family that grew up on very small islands where you’re connected to the natural world, caring about the environment was something that was just a part of my life. But it was a hum, not a roar. My aha moment was in Spain, as the co-founder of an innovation hub that helped to launch a large-scale climate infrastructure project. When you sit in the room with experts and you hear them lay out, in frank language, how little time we…

Capitalism is a powerful engine of prosperity. Now, more than ever, we need it to flex its job-creating muscle. At the same time, as American billionaire hedge-fund manager Ray Dalio recently acknowledged, “capitalism is a fundamentally sound system that is now not working well for the majority of people.” He warned that “the income/wealth/opportunity gap is leading to dangerous social and political divisions that threaten our cohesive fabric and capitalism itself.” That gap threatens the social contract in Canada and around the world, particularly as environmental impacts grip our planet. To heal those divisions, Canada will need to close the political-posturing gap between western and eastern politics through meaningful, inclusive economic policy. To do so, we’ll need leadership that goes beyond platitudes and party politics, setting partisanship aside to put…

Former Toronto mayor on how cities can solve the climate challenge from the ground up with waste heat and more Toronto journalist John Lorinc writes about cities, sustainability and business. It started, as these things often do, with an irritant. About a decade ago, Lynn Mueller, then in his mid-50s, had just retired from a run leading a geothermal firm. As he was casting about for his next act, Mueller noticed that his annual water bill had soared to more than $1,000 – a fact of domestic life he attributed to the presence of two teenagers. “Being a cheapskate,” he recalls with a chuckle, “I wanted to figure out how to get that money back.” Leaning in, Mueller realized those dollars were literally flowing down the drain, in the form…

In fall 2018, London faced a blizzard of fierce, smart protests. In October, a thousand people occupied the street in front of the fabled Houses of Parliament. In November, activists blockaded government offices, glued themselves to the gates of Downing Street, blocked traffic and occupied five bridges over the River Thames. “Our political economy is hardwired to resist the change needed.”— Extinction Rebellion manifesto That was the public’s introduction to Extinction Rebellion (XR), a direct-action group inspired by 100 British academics and scientists who publicly expressed concerns about the environmental crisis and their disgust with society’s failure to confront it. XR demands that the U.K. government tell the truth about climate and reduce carbon emissions to net-zero by 2025. Traffic stopped. Tempers flared. Hundreds were arrested. While most of XR’s…

As an Inuk woman, my life’s journey and work has been driven by my traditional upbringing, which taught me early on that the land is an extension of ourselves. The Inuit way of life is dependent on the cold, ice and snow. For us, ice is transportation and mobility; it allows us to hunt for the nutritious traditional food that sustains us. As the planet warms, the vanishing ice becomes an issue of safety and security, first and foremost. The ice forms later in the fall and breaks up earlier in the spring. Unpredictable weather makes it difficult to use Indigenous knowledge to read the changing conditions. As a result of melting permafrost and coastal erosion, some homes are buckling and need to be moved, and some homes, in Alaska…

”Everyone with a pension should check that it’s not doing the exact opposite of what they’re working for.“ It’s as much of a surprise to me to be writing about pensions as it probably is to you to be reading it. In my other life, I’m the writer of films like Four Weddings and a Funeral and Love Actually, but these days my real passion is pensions to be proud of. I’m working on a campaign I helped launch called Make My Money Matter. Here’s my whistle-stop tour: I started a charity called Red Nose Day 30 years ago that has so far raised about US$1.5 billion for children in need. In 2005, I worked on the Make Poverty History campaign and the Live 8 concerts, trying to encourage the…

”We might have the right tools to address the climate emergency, but do we have the right mindset, means and mechanisms to put them to best use?“ Two decades ago when I coined the word “cleantech,” little did I imagine that in the years to come US$200 billion of venture capital would be invested in innovative cleantech start-ups and growth-stage companies around the world. Already investments in entrepreneurial innovation have dramatically reduced the cost of batteries, solar cells and other technologies – what some are calling “climate-tech” – while spawning whole new consumer offerings, such as alternative-protein foods, electric vehicles and smart thermostats. Today, there’s no shortage of scalable solutions, and more are on their way. And yet, the climate emergency becomes ever more perilous, with growing awareness that it’s…

There’s something about a global pandemic that radically cements trends. Locking millions of Canadians inside their homes for much of the year has a way of propelling the shift toward all things digital. It’s also catalyzing support for initiatives that vow to treat the planet, and the humans on it, with more consideration. All of which has created the perfect petri dish for responsible robo-advisors. More millennials are looking to invest, and a surge of digital platforms are offering up automated, algorithm-driven investment services to help them do just that. Canada’s top robo-advisors say they’ve experienced double-digit growth since the start of the pandemic. Wealthsimple’s client base is up 24%. RBC’s Rajan Bansi called 2020 a “record year” for his bank’s InvestEase app – with RBC’s responsible portfolio a key…

Don Drummond is the Stauffer-Dunning Fellow and an adjunct professor at the School of Policy Studies at Queen’s University. The financial crisis was only 12 years ago, but it seems almost everything has changed since. At that time, policy was myopically concerned with two things. First, restoring liquidity in financial markets; central banks took unprecedented steps to do that. Second, bolstering aggregate demand through very large fiscal stimulus packages. The crisis was devastating. But it and the policy responses did not seem all that complex. The fiscal stimulus was mostly of a conventional form. Lots of shovels-in-the-ground sort of thing. And it was almost all focused on the near-term. Indeed, Canada, like almost all other countries, dramatically swung to austerity just 24 months into the crisis aftermath, when the economy…