Innholdsfortegnelse for Summer 2023 i Corporate Knights

When a problem is likely to be resolved at some point in the future with no lasting harm, they say it will all come out in the wash. Back in 1986, an ecologist on a research trip to Fiji reportedly coined the term “greenwashing” in an essay critiquing a beachfront resort’s towel reuse policy. Four decades later, greenwashed marketing claims, did not, it turns out, come out in the wash. They’ve permeated nearly every product category, from “carbon neutral” burgers and disposable cola bottles made with “plastic from the sea” to net-zero oil companies and ESG labels slapped on trillions of dollars in poorly regulated investment funds. But the Wild West era may be coming to an end. As The Atlantic put it in March, “The world is finally cracking…

The home of the New York striploin is coming for your meat. Food accounts for 20% of the Big Apple’s greenhouse gas emissions – parking it in third spot, greenhouse gas–wise, behind the city’s traffic jams and drafty old buildings. “But all food is not created equal,” said Mayor Eric Adams in a press release. “The vast majority of food that is contributing to the emissions crisis lies in meat and dairy products.” Under former mayor Bill de Blasio, NYC committed to cutting the city government’s food-related emissions by 25% by 2030. This April, Adams raised that target to 33%. In doing so, he said, “We have to talk about beef” – a comment that The New York Times called “an unusually frank admission from a national political leader that…

Eric Reguly is the European bureau chief for The Globe and Mail and is based in Rome. About 100 kilometres from the front lines of the conflict in southern Ukraine, 650 workers building the Tyligulska wind farm dove into underground concrete bomb shelters whenever Russian missiles and drones attacked targets nearby. The crews, clad with body armour, toiled for seven months, much of the time during the dead of winter. They spentroughly one day in five underground when the explosions came too close for comfort. By mid-March, the first stage of Ukraine’s newest renewable energy project – 19 turbines with a capacity of 114 megawatts – was completed. None of the workers had been killed or injured, and the turbines began to generate much-needed electricity a few weeks later. During…

Alex Robinson is an Ottawa-based journalist and deputy editor at Corporate Knights. When he was a young boy growing up on a farm in southern Israel, Assaf Dotan says, there were always lots of wild animals around. But over the years, henoticed their numbers dwindled as the farmers in the area started using more chemical products in their fields. One of those products was synthetic nitrogen fertilizer. Dotan is now the CEO of Grace Breeding, an Israeli agricultural tech start-up that has developed what it says is a biological alternative to synthetic fertilizers, which emit nitrous oxide, a potent greenhouse gas, when applied in fields. Dotan’s company is one of dozens around the globe looking to offer a biological substitute to chemical fertilizers. “For many years, agriculture has grown by…

“It’s not just one thing or the other. You can… lower your bills. But it’s also better for the environment.”—Anya Barkan Anya Barkan’s water heater was 15 years old and “apiece of garbage” when she called her rental company and asked for it to be replaced. After some back and forth that left her frustrated, she decided to break free from the rental contract she had inherited when she bought her home and get a heat-pump water heater. “It just made sense. We wanted to stop that monthly fee and get something that is much more energy-efficient and also not reliant on natural gas,” she says. Breaking the contract proved much harder than getting the heat-pump water heater. But ever since, Barkan says, she has been happy – and not…

I magine a world where consumers have access to affordable, locally grown plant-based foods every day. Where we navigate crowded city streets on smaller, nimbler electric vehicles and every truck runs on zero-emission fuel. A world without unnecessary disposable plastic, where cities harvest heat from the earth, and where waste from food, farms and landfills is up-cycled into clean-burning biogas. Sounds like a climate activist’s wish list. But a group of dynamic young Canadian companies are already working on making these solutions an everyday reality. This is the Future 50, Corporate Knights’ second annual ranking of ambitious entrepreneurs who are trying to solve big problems in climate, energy, the environment, transportation, healthcare, waste disposal – even the Canadian diet. In an economy where legacy suppliers have been slow – or…

Some insurance companies have started to decline coverage for certain new fossil fuel projects, untangling themselves from the risks that come with propping up coal, oil and gas. So climate activists were surprised and disappointed when three large reinsurance companies backed out of the United Nations’ Net-Zero Insurance Alliance (NZIA) within just three weeks of each other this spring. Munich Re, Zurich Insurance Group and Hannover Re each announced they were quitting NZIA. In late March, Munich Re said that it was leaving the alliance because of antitrust concerns but that it was still committed to decarbonization. Zurich followed days later. Hannover Re didn’t give any reasons for its decision but said it is also still committed to its climate targets. Climate campaigners fear that the antitrust risks cited by…

There are more than seven million data centres in the world, housing servers that store massive amounts of digital information. They act as the world’s IT brain or hive, receiving and transmitting all sorts of information and enabling everyday conveniences like online shopping. But these facilities, which are notorious for their high electricity consumption and enormous carbon footprints, may soon have a new spinoff function: helping grow food. A Canadian company called QScale is developing a $1-billion 30-acre data-centre campus in Lévis, Quebec, and will use the warmth that emanates from its servers to grow more than 80,000 tonnes of produce in adjacent greenhouses every year. Power-hungry data centres going green Global renewable-energy power purchase agreements, 2010–2021 Indoor farming, often hailed as the future of food production, is also very…

Naomi Buck is a Toronto-based writer. In the fourth year of her accounting degree at McGill University, Sarah Keyes walked into the classroom of a mandatory credit course called The Social Context of Business. When she walked out that day in 2009, she wasn’t sure she still wanted to be an accountant. The professor – one Louis Chauvin – was a standout in McGill’s Desautels Faculty of Management. Wearing nubbly woolen sweaters and a full grey beard, he started each class with a brief meditation before launching into the subject at hand: the social and environmental devastation wrought by the corporate world the students were clamouring to enter. Chauvin framed the most urgent issues facing the planet – climate change, waste, pollution, slave and child labour – as accounting failures.…

Sitting at his desk in Montreal, BrainBox AI founder and CEO Sam Ramadori frequently refers to the sleek corporate high-rises visible through his office window in the heart of the city’s business district. Gradually filling up again with people after the long pandemic hiatus, these towers are not just workplaces, but complicated architectural machines. “If you look behind me, those towers have hundreds of rooms in them, each one of them kind of different,” he observes. “Some of them face the sun, some of them don’t, some of them are occupied or unoccupied.” These structures, moreover, are served by centralized heating and air-conditioning systems, which are fitted with hundreds of sensors, as well as software controllers designed to knit all the tech together, and typically run on naturalgas-powered boilers and…

“I’m sure we’ve saved thousands of dollars in fuel and maintenance.”—David Hollingworth David Hollingworth is an active skier, someone who heads up to Whistler from his home in North Vancouver for a day on the slopes whenever the powder is fresh. But unlike many of his neighbours, he straps his skis to the top of his EV – a Nissan Leaf – for the trip into the mountains and leaves his family’s gas-powered car – a Honda CRV – at home. “It’s just a no-brainer, the cost savings,” he says. While it costs more than $100 to gas up the CRV, Hollingworth estimates that an overnight charge for the Leaf runs him only about $2. In the eight years since he bought his EV, Hollingworth says, he’s grown more enamoured…

Hero: ICIJ Sadly, business can seldom be relied on to police its own behaviour. We thus have little choice but to fall back on governments, NGOs and, not least, activists and the media to do the job. Yet the record of these outside watchdogs is also decidedly mixed. At the “hero” end of the spectrum, we tip our hats to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), a non-profit network of 280 journalists in more than 100 countries who collaborate on cross-border investigative projects. The ICIJ’s mission, as its website puts it, is to convince reporters around the world “to set aside traditional rivalries to uncover corruption, abuses of power and grave harms inflicted on the world’s most vulnerable people.” Best known for exposing the offshore holdings of scores of…

ChatGPT did not write this. But artificial intelligence will continue to have a profound impact on the job market over the next five years. That’s one of the takeaways from a new report from the World Economic Forum (WEF) that maps out the future of employment. The report says that by 2027, nearly one-quarter of the labour market will experience disruption – signalling a significant shift as jobs are lost and created. The key drivers of this change are the technology, environmental and economic sectors. There’s going to be a net loss of 14 million jobs, or about 2% of current employment, according to the WEF. This is the fourth edition of the Future of Jobs Report, which poses questions to 803 companies that collectively employ more than 11.3 million…

More than five billion trees are cut down every year for paper, packaging and fashion. Many of them are in ancient, old-growth forests that are not just rich in biodiversity but are crucial carbon sinks that absorb massive amounts of the C02 we belch out every year. But what if you could take the mountains of clothes and paper that are discarded and turn that into clothes and paper again, leaving those endangered forests alone to do much more important work? It’s already happening. And a major cash investment into a Canadian non-profit is designed to help scale up this innovative engine of the circular economy at a critical time in climate action. Last month, Vancouver-based Canopy received US$60 million from The Audacious Project, a funding initiative affiliated with TED…

Toronto journalist John Lorinc writes about cities, sustainability and business. On a sleepy swath of farmland near the Six Nations of the Grand River reserve in southwestern Ontario’s Haldimand County, work crews later this year will begin planting a very different type of cash crop in a region of the province that’s well known for its berries, greens and grains. This piece of land is set to become one of North America’s largest battery farms – a facility that will house banks of high-capacity lithium-ion modules capable of storing 250 megawatts of electricity, enough to provide four hours of power to 250,000 homes. This utility-scale project, several years in the making, will provide backup storage to Canada’s most populous province and is being built by Six Nations of the Grand…

On the other hand, AI also poses risks that could potentially have catastrophic consequences for humanity. For example, the development of autonomous weapons or the misuse of AI by malicious actors could lead to widespread conflict and destruction.—ChatGPT Editor’s note: Our initial assignment to ChatGPT was to write a 1,000-word news article on AI and the climate crisis using quotes from thought leaders. It turned in clean copy with captivating – and very fake – quotes. Good old human-powered fact-checking caught the errors. Chat apologized for the confusion and said the quotes were fabricated by the AI model. We killed the story and opted for a Q&A instead. Q: Can AI help slow climate change? A: Yes, AI can help slow climate change by improving our understanding of climate patterns,…

“We’re saving a lot of money. We’re really happy with that.”—Brian Gifford Shortly after Brian Gifford retired and moved backto Halifax, he knew he had to do something about the oil furnace in his basement, which was costing him $2,500 to run each winter. Not knowing that he had any choice but to continue to use oil, he added insulation to his basement, walls and attic – and saw his heating bills go down to $1,700. Five years later, he was told his firebox had a crack and the furnace would have to be replaced, so he looked at switching to natural gas – newly available in the Maritimes – or buying an electric heat pump. “Both environmentally and financially, heat pumps made a whole lot more sense,” he says.…