Providing information empowering markets to foster a better world. Corporate Knights produces editorial at the intersection of business and society, with news and analysis about sustainability and corporate sustainability rankings
Realistic environmentalism Re: Winter issue. With Green Extremism in full retreat led by corporate knights and politicians around the Globe, I read your Winter issue with amusement. In this cold and white winter, Realistic Environmentalism, preferred by most people (not your contributors) is taking over. As your winter 2025 cover says – “Now What?” It’s time for your editors to shun defeatist extremism and join the movement of optimistic Realistic Environmentalists. You need a new focus on climate history, adaptability, economic compatibility and, yes, taking the easy and gradual steps to slow the man-made part of climate change, plus don’t leave out new technologies to come. —David Paleczny, Conestogo, ON CK: Thanks for your input, David. We believe the most realistic outlook is the one that reflects the scientific evidence,…
The first episode of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, which aired on the BBC in October 1969, was titled “Whither Canada?” More than half a century later, it’s once again a good question. If we don’t get to a much stronger place soon, we may cease to be a nation-state at all. We’ve long been aware of the risks of the elephant next door. We have risen to the challenge when called for, before and after Confederation. When the United States invaded Upper Canada in 1812, under the leadership of British Major-General Robert Ross, we literally ate their dinner (President Madison fled, leaving an untouched feast) and burned the White House down. After Confederation, to unite Canada and thwart U.S. expansionism, Sir John A. Mac-donald, along with a team of builders…
It’s a pastoral scene straight out of Middlemarch, with a steampunk twist: flocks of woolly sheep wandering a green expanse, cropping grass and resting from the noonday sun in the shade of row upon row of shimmering black photovoltaic arrays extending to the horizon. The solar panels provide clean energy; the sheep provide cheap lawnmowing services that keep the panels from overheating. “There’s no longer any question that this works,” says Ivey Business School professor Joshua Pearce, who is also the founder of the not-for-profit Agrivoltaics Canada. The portmanteau reflects the desire to unite two constituencies – farmers and solar panel companies – whose interests often pit them against one another. Farming sunshine is like farming wheat, corn or barley: it’s easiest on flat expanses of treeless land with easy…
If there is a limit to how far populist politics can detach from the concrete realities of a warming planet, those living under the aspirational authoritarianism of President Donald Trump are well positioned to find out. Trump’s second administration has frozen billions in funding for research and laid off thousands of people working at science agencies. The president’s loyalists are enforcing a keyword-directed censorship campaign to expunge research tied to culture-war hobgoblins like diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility. Also targeted for suppression: the study of climate change – the basic physical process of global warming that has been accurately understood and described since the early 19th century. Ideologues and allies of the oil and gas industry may find it convenient to suppress two centuries of atmospheric science, but many large…
In Fort Nelson First Nation, the remnants of a fossil fuel era that made oil barons rich are littered across the landscape. Orphaned oil wells punctuate the Dene and Cree community’s traditional territory in northeastern British Columbia. These wells abandoned by the fossil fuel extraction industry now represent an environmental risk for local residents, who saw scant economic benefit from the extraction of the crude oil that flowed beneath them. But from those depths comes another chapter in Fort Nelson First Nation’s energy story, one that is green, and that it controls. Using royalties that the band office received from oil prospectors over decades, the community is now embarking on an entirely different transformation, looking to the future and developing a geothermal plant out of an orphaned oil well. It’s…
For environmentalists, the single-serving coffee pod is a poster child for the very worst kind of wasteful consumer packaging. But last summer, Nespresso, one of the leading players in this sector, embarked on a plan to reclaim its pods’ reputation as well as the materials used to make these caffeinated conveniences. Under a new blue-box program developed in partnership with a provincially established non-profit called Circular Materials, residents of London, Ontario, can drop their used pods, which are made with an aluminum mesh and frame, in a special bag that comes in the Nespresso package. Then they put the sack in the blue bin on recycling days. The spent pods are collected and sent to one of three recycling facilities, where the coffee and the casing are separated. The aluminum…
