Corporate Knights Winter 2022

WHO ARE YOU CALLING SCARY? John Lorinc’s recent piece, “House on Fire,” provides a perspective on how to meet energy needs without natural gas and its infrastructure. He describes an ICF International study, commissioned by the Canadian Gas Association (CGA), as a “scare tactic.” “Scare tactic” does not seem the appropriate term for a report from highly credible independent energy analysts, a report that details – using well-documented sources – the costs of replacing natural gas with electricity. Here at the CGA, we think “scare tactic” is a term better used to describe the graphic for the Lorinc article – an ominous image of a forced-air vent shown with flames coming out of it, [presumably] suggesting the perils of gas heating. We in the gas industry are working hard to…

The great pioneers of biodiversity, Thomas Lovejoy and E.O. “Antman” Wilson, and the heroic healer Archbishop Desmond Tutu, whose devotion to universal dignity and sheer willpower helped steer South Africa’s antiapartheid movement to democracy, died in late December. Despite living with their eyes (or eye in the case of Wilson, who partly lost his vision in a fishing accident) wide open for a combined 262 years in the belly of racial and rainforest carnage, these three wise men never lost hope in our ability to choose a brighter tomorrow. Thankfully, for the first time in my life, the world’s most powerful business and political leaders are now all on record vowing to work toward a brighter tomorrow for the planet. Financial firms have pledged that more than US$130 trillion of…

As the dust settles from COP26, civil society organizations are gearing up to hold financial industry players accountable on the lofty commitments they made in Glasgow in November. Many of the world’s biggest banks face the enormous challenge of realigning their entire loans and investment operations in the coming years to put themselves on a credible path to achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. “We want to see whether they are requiring all their clients to actually disclose their [greenhouse gas emissions],” said Danielle Fugere, CEO at As You Sow, a San Francisco–based shareholder advisory service, in an interview. “Ultimately, best practices come down to are we seeing year-over-year changes in their capital flows?” Under the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero forged for COP26, the banks have committed to…

For the leaders of the divestment movement, which encourages institutional investors to sell off their shares in fossil fuel companies, winning isn’t everything. Eroding public support for the sector has been considered valuable work in itself. But after a decade of determined lobbying, the divest side is suddenly doing a lot of winning. Just before the launch of COP26, the UN climate conference in November, the DivestInvest network calculated that endowments, portfolios and pension funds worth nearly US$40 trillion have now committed to divesting their fossil fuel holdings. That tally, they noted, is bigger than the combined GDP of the U.S. and China. From the US$16-billion Ford Foundation (the ultimate fossil fuel fortune) to Quebec’s giant pension fund, the Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec, 1,485 institutions have now…

Fasten your seat belt. Annual shareholder meeting season is coming up, and North America’s biggest companies can expect a bumpy ride. Activist shareholders are gearing up to challenge more corporations on how they manage diversity, equity and inclusion. What used to be a box-checking exercise has gained real urgency after two social upheavals – the unequal impacts of COVID-19 and the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police in the spring of 2020 – revealed the enduring hold of systemic racism in North America. It’s no longer enough for companies to form diversity committees or hold inclusion workshops. Activist investors, mainly on the pension fund side, are demanding that big firms conduct intensive “racial equity audits” by outside experts to discover all the overt and hidden biases…

Here’s a green riddle for you: if a tree falls in the forest and it’s chipped, then shipped to be burned for electricity, is it carbon neutral? It’s a question that’s been tripping up national carbon calculators around the globe since the days of the Kyoto Protocol. From the late 1990s, industry and governments have largely considered burning wood pellets in power stations to be renewable, zero-emitting energy, since planting new trees should, theoretically, absorb enough carbon dioxide to cancel out the emissions that come out of smokestacks as they burn. But doubts regarding the science behind those claims and the sustainability of the practice have been mounting as more countries ramp up the burning of woody biomass as a replacement for coal. In October, the world’s largest biomassburning power…