Innholdsfortegnelse for Summer 2021 i Corporate Knights

NATURAL GAS NO TRANSITION FUEL I object strongly to your article by Max Fawcett [“Was cancelling Keystone the catalyst Calgary didn’t know it needed”]. Fawcett writes cheerily about replacing coal-generated electricity with gas. If successful, that will entrench gas-generated GHGs for 20 to 30 years, long past when we must be done with gas, too. The article does not mention the science that shows that gas is as bad a producer of GHGs as coal. There is a myth that gas is some kind of transitional fuel, but it is actually an entrenchment weapon, dooming us to years more of GHG emissions. The damage will be paid for by our children and grandchildren. —Ian D. Brown, Victoria, B.C. CK: Thanks, Ian. You make an important point. There’s no room in…

Producers of meat and dairy products love to talk about their commitment to health. But whose health are they really promoting? A new study from New York University says top international food producers are lagging behind industries that are actively trying to cut greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Worse, the researchers say, U.S.-based agro-giants have spent hundreds of millions campaigning against climate action and obscuring the role meat and dairy play in damaging the planet. It’s enough to make you switch to bean burgers. The study, The Climate Responsibilities of Industrial Meat and Dairy Producers, in the journal Climatic Change, contends that animal agriculture generates 14.5% of all humancaused GHG emissions. The researchers examined the records of 35 major producers and found that only five, as of last summer, had joined…

When Corporate Knights published its first list of Canada’s Best 50 Corporate Citizens in 2002, there was no Paris Agreement. There was little in the way of sustainable investing, few protocols for measuring the social and environmental impacts of businesses, no Greta Thunberg. (Literally: she was born in 2003.) In 2002, the Republicans were running Washington and gutting the Clean Air Act. In Ottawa, Prime Minister Jean Chrétien, facing his last year in office, was just starting to think environmentally. Public concern over “global warming” was boiling over – but where were the leaders? It turns out they were all around us. In early 2002, a newborn magazine called Corporate Knights formed an advisory committee of eminent Canadians to help design the first annual ranking of Canada’s most sustainable business…

Alethal pandemic, disrupted global supply chains, record restaurant closures and rising social-justice concerns. Perfect timing for a new college degree in food issues this fall, right? Apparently, yes. “The whole world has been turned upside down, and there are a lot of new issues in terms of food that have come to the fore,” says Lori Stahlbrand, co-developer of a new four-year Honours Bachelor of Food Studies at George Brown College in Toronto. “Food is a major contributor to climate change and greenhouse gases,” she says. “It is a major employer and now is going through a massive upheaval.” In March, a United Nations study linked one-third of global greenhouse emissions caused by human activity to the production, processing and packaging of food. At George Brown, with a long-established chef…

Pete Richardson is a climate strategist at Manifest Climate. There aren’t many planes in the sky right now, but those that are have two things in common: they’ve got both a detailed flight plan and guidance from people in control towers who have sightlines across multiple flight paths and a laser focus on getting everyone safely to their destinations. In the same way, our banks, pension funds and insurance companies need detailed plans and system-level guidance with respect to their responses to the climate crisis. We need to ensure that sufficient capital is flowing toward vital climate solutions, enabling the pace and scope of the retooling required of our energy, industrial and built environments. We also need to more intentionally manage the financial risks associated with industries and activities that…

We grew up in the late ’80s associating corporations with Exxon Valdez, going to bed at night scared that every minute a football field of rainforest was being slaughtered. We grew up hearing how corporations were screwing up the world – our future. My university classmate and tennis nemesis Paul Fengler and I decided there had to be a better way. As we wrote in our first editor’s note on the release of our inaugural Best 50 Corporate Citizens in Canada, “Corporations don’t exist in a vacuum: we as citizens are their lifeblood. Our ignorance and complacency does not grant permission to corporations to destroy the world – it necessitates it.” We joked that our legal budget didn’t permit a ranking of the worst companies in Canada, so we took…

“Running bitcoin,” tweeted cryptocurrency pioneer Hal Finney in January 2009. A few days later, he received the first 10 Bitcoins ever traded. Finney loved the idea of a secure, anonymous digital token free of national controls. But two weeks later he returned to Twitter to warn of a bug in the system: “Thinking about how to reduce CO2 emissions from a widespread Bitcoin implementation.” Twelve years later, the world is coming to grips with the eco-disaster that is Bitcoin. The currency backstops an alternative global payment system, with the value of a single Bitcoin hitting $79,000 in mid-April, up from $10,000 in January 2020. But Bitcoins are intangible units of value created by networks of supercomputers, and the environmental impact of running these machines equals the carbon footprint of a…

American business leaders know how to talk the talk. But the bitter aftermath of the 2020 election is exposing their inability to walk the walk. Democrat Joe Biden may have ejected Donald Trump from the White House, but Republicans have been emboldened to pass laws aimed at disenfranchising liberal voters in future elections. Echoing Trump’s baseless charges that the election was rigged, lawmakers in Iowa, Georgia, Florida, Texas and seven other GOP-led states pushed through rules that restrict absentee voting, tighten ID requirements and empower partisan state officials to settle disputes. Most of these measures were contrived to inconvenience Black, Brown and young voters, whose support for Biden tipped the scales in November. Biden criticized the initiatives as “un-American.” But he has little power to stop them without a firm…

Eugene Ellmen writes about sustainable business and finance. He lives in Hamilton, Ontario. By pledging to reach carbon neutrality by 2050, the Canadian steel industry has launched itself on a massive transformation. To meet this target, the industry will need to overturn a century of blast furnace steelmaking. These furnaces, huge cauldrons of molten metal at temperatures of more than 1,600°C, consume vast quantities of metallurgical coal, and in the process spew millions of tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere. “I can’t stress enough how significant a transformation this is,” says Catherine Cobden, CEO of the Canadian Steel Producers Association (CSPA), which made the net-zero pledge in March 2020. “It is an aspirational goal, and it will take a significant effort to achieve it.” But critics say the 2050 goal…

Performance indicators Clean Revenue: Percentage of total revenue derived from products and services that are categorized as “clean” under CK taxonomy Clean Investment: Percentage of total investments in assets that are categorized as “clean” under CK Clean Economy Taxonomy Board/Executive Gender Diversity: Percentage of non-male board members and executives Board/Executive Racial Diversity: Percentage of racially diverse board members and executives Sustainability Pay Link: At least one senior executive’s compensation tied to sustainabilitythemed performance targets Percentage Tax Paid: Taxes paid in cash, as a percentage of EBITDA (operating income for financial services) Financial Sanctions: Total fines, penalties and settlements as a percentage of revenue Paid Sick Leave: 10 or more paid sick-leave days per year Pension Fund Status: A series of calculations assessing the generosity/viability of defined contribution/defined benefit plans Energy/Carbon/Waste/Waste Productivity:…

Patagonia: The green pioneers have been spearheading a certified Regenerative Organic seal with the Regenerative Organic Alliance and using certified ingredients to make cotton T-shirts and the like. Timberland, Vans and NorthFace (VF Corp. companies): All main materials are to be recycled, regenerative or renewable by 2025. Timberland is currently piloting a regenerative rubber supply. PepsiCo: The company says all seven million acres of PepsiCo’s farm footprint will be regenerative by 2030, more than 500,000 acres in 2021. General Mills: In 2019, General Mills announced its goal of having one million acres be regenerative by 2030. Kering: Gucci’s parent company is funding the transition of one million hectares of land to regenerative practices with Conservation International, as well as one million in protected habitat “outside of its direct supply chain.”…

Paula Allen is the global leader and senior vice-president of research and total well-being at LifeWorks (previously Morneau Shepell). The human brain doesn’t like uncertainty. Yet thanks to the pandemic, uncertainty now defines our collective experience. Add to that our separation from others, restrictions that prohibit our usual outlets for stress and, most significantly, the loss of much of our sense of control, and you have the definition of trauma. As the COVID-19 pandemic wore on, we saw an astounding decline in the mental health of Canada’s working population. Burnout levels are triple those of 2019. Suicidal ideation among employees seeking counselling services has doubled. Even those who usually have good mental health are feeling more anxious and strained. Indeed, 80% of the working population indicates that the pandemic has…

Flexible, lightweight and low-cost, plastics are the building block of the modern economy, with their use growing 20-fold in the past 50 years. But plastic’s ascendance comes with high costs and heavy burdens: the World Economic Forum predicts that by 2050, at current growth rates, there will be more waste plastic in the oceans (by tonnage) than fish. Consumers and governments are fighting back, demanding higher recycling rates and bans on single-use plastics. In the way, however, are many of the world’s biggest fossil-fuel companies, hoping that increased plastics production will make up for shrinking oil demand as the transportation sectors shift to electric power. According to energy think tank Carbon Tracker, the U.S. petrochemical industry has invested $97 billion in new petrochemical capacity over the past decade, and was…

What do former vice-president Al Gore, rock star and U2 frontman Bono, and Canadian-born Jeff Skoll, the first president of eBay, have in common? All three have become prominent social entrepreneurs – hands-on philanthropists seeking new solutions to global ills. And all three are now invested in a Calgary company called Benevity, whose mission is to “help the world’s most iconic brands bring their purpose to life.” Benevity began above a shawarma shop in 2008. Former CEO Bryan de Lottinville launched the firm to boost companies’ charitable contributions by helping them see social purpose as an investment, not a handout. Today, Benevity helps companies increase employee and customer engagement with a “gamified” platform that makes it easy and fun for firms, staff and clients to pursue their interests in donating…

Stephanie Wallcraft is a multiple-awardwinning automotive journalist based in Toronto and is the president of the Automobile Journalists Association of Canada. While commuter traffic may have slowed dramatically through the first year of the pandemic, one group of motorists was clocking more miles than usual: delivery drivers. Between May 2019 and May 2020, Canadian online retail sales more than doubled, according to Statistics Canada. That surge in e-commerce has meant a spike in last-mile deliveries – the final stage of order fulfillment betweenour purchased items leaving local distribution hubs and arriving at our front doors. While ramping up sales of electric passenger vehicles is important and inevitable, last-mile freight delivery offers the lowest-hanging fruit for rapid reduction of carbon emissions. As of today, Natural Resources Canada data show that transportation-related…

Sophie Brochu was a couple of months into a long-awaited career sabbatical when the Hydro-Québec board asked her to consider taking the top job at the public utility. After 30 years in the energy sector, including most recently as president and CEO at Énergir (formerly Gaz Métro), Brochu had planned to split her time between studying in Paris and teaching in Montreal. But it was the start of the global pandemic and Brochu felt a civic duty to help her community in the best way she knew how. “I don’t know much, but I know energy, and Hydro-Québec is a formidable organization,” she says. “For me, the call to go was very strong.” It helped that Hydro-Québec was a sustainability leader and, Brochu believes, “a place where you can move…

In 50 years, the global population has exploded to 7.8 billion from 3.7 billion, placing enormous demand upon farmland. Chemical fertilizers, a pillar of last century’s Green Revolution, boosted crop production to feed a hungry planet. However, this bucolic landscape hid an alarming reality. Excess use of synthetic fertilizers like nitrogen caused widespread soil degradation, a drop in plant nutrition and toxic algae blooms in waterways. Nitrogen – which is usually combined with two other fertilizer macronutrients, phosphorous and potassium, and then sold as NPK – also exacerbates climate change. The world’s most widely used fertilizer, at 100 million tonnes per year globally, synthetic nitrogen leaches into ground water as nitrates, which enter the atmosphere as the greenhouse gas nitrous oxide. N2O has 300 times the warming effect of carbon…

At the border of India’s capital city, New Delhi, temperatures are soaring. As the heat inches above 40°C, farmers rallying against three agricultural reform laws passed by the government in November 2020 are still here, protesting. It has been more than six months since one of the biggest and most vibrant protests in human history began, but as a second, deadly wave of COVID-19 devastates the country, farmers are now battling the state with their lives on the line. Prime Minister Narendra Modi claims that the contentious laws will bring much-needed private sector investment into a key segment of the economy – by loosening regulations that deal with the stocking, pricing and selling of produce. But dissidents maintain that it will only worsen their condition – eroding the safety that…

What’s promised: This ETF invests in large- and mid-capitalization U.S. equity securities “tilting towards those that BlackRock believes are better positioned to benefit from the transition to a lowcarbon economy.” What’s inside: The fund is dominated by all the standard Big Tech firms found in conventional ETF holdings: Apple, Amazon, Alphabet, Facebook, the last two of which have been booted off the Corporate Knights Global 100 index because of red-flagged illegal activity. In fact, more than a quarter of this fund’s holdings trip our red-flag alarms, including manufacturers of harmful pesticides, major weapons contractors (think Honeywell and Raytheon) and Big Pharma laggards failing on offering fair access to medicines. Since this is a low-carbon transition fund, let’s break down which holdings trigger Corporate Knights climate-related flags: • 14 energy companies with…