Tabla de contenidos para Spring 2025 en Corporate Knights

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,…

In the days following Donald Trump’s fateful ballot box victory in November, environmental advocates the world over stumbled around shellshocked, feeling the ear-splitting pressure change of a bomb dropped on climate progress months before they’d ever see the fallout. As grief and fear spilled onto social media feeds, one climate leader held space for hope. “There is an antidote to doom and despair,” the architect of the landmark 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change posted. “It’s action on the ground, and it’s happening in all corners of the Earth.” Now a decade since Christiana Figueres accomplished the Herculean task of getting 196 countries to put their differences aside and adopt the accord, the former United Nations climate chief and long-time Costa Rican diplomat remains deeply attuned to the emotional toll…

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…

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…

It had been 30 years since a train ran through Argentina’s Quebrada de Humahuaca. The mountainous region in the northern province of Jujuy is known for its enchanting, multicoloured rockscape and the chain of Quechua settlements that hug the rugged valley. In 1993, a diesel locomotive ceased to operate. But last year, after track upgrades and a concerted effort from local politicians, a gleaming solar-powered battery train made its maiden run. Authorities have gushed about the electric train, describing it as a beacon of green innovation that could bolster one of the most popular tourist destinations in the country. But zoom out and another picture snaps into view. Engineered by a state-owned Chinese manufacturer, with Chinese-made lithium phosphate batteries charged by a Chinese-built solar farm, the 70-seat train is an…

In May of 2022, Adam Kahane was invited to Ottawa to be awarded the Order of Canada for his distinguished career in group facilitation and systems transformation. Kahane describes the scene at Rideau Hall as busy; the backlog of recipients that had developed during the pandemic milled around, waiting to receive their awards. Out of the crowd, a man emerged, introduced himself to Kahane as a veterinary epidemiologist and thanked him for his latest book. “It made me realize,” the man said, “that people are the problem, not animals.” The vet was not Kahane’s first unlikely fan. The director of Reos Partners, a global consultancy on systems change and conflict resolution, has also found quite a following among divorce lawyers. It doesn’t surprise him. “Really, all my work follows the…

Hero: Costco On his first day back in the White House, Donald Trump signed an executive order requiring the federal government to “terminate all mandates, policies, programs, preferences, and activities relating to ‘diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility.’” The next day, the president extended his purge into the private sector. A second executive order compelled government agencies to certify that organizations receiving grants or contracts do not operate DEI programs. The directive also warned private companies and colleges against maintaining “illegal DEI programs,” presumably referring to a 2023 Supreme Court decision that found colleges’ race-based admissions programs unconstitutional. Even as the American Civil Liberties Union protested that DEI policies “helped dismantle entrenched race and sex segregation in high-paying industries,” thousands of civil servants were losing their jobs, and companies such as…

In April 1942, in a BBC radio address on the challenge of rebuilding London after the Blitz, John Maynard Keynes famously spoke a truism that would inform postwar reconstruction everywhere: “Anything we can actually do, we can afford.” The fossil fuel era has been a self-inflicted blitz on the integrity of the Earth’s life-support systems. The path to peace includes first reimagining and then rebuilding our energy system, and smartly. For Canada, this means deploying millions of heat pumps and tens of millions of electric vehicles and supplying them all with emission-free, renewable electricity. Over the next quarter century, we need as many as 100,000 wind turbines and 100 million solar panels. This is not your grandfather’s grid. At Corporate Knights, our Climate Dollars project has been imagining and modelling…

Since 2020, the city of Honolulu in Hawaii has sought to hold oil and gas companies liable for misleading the public about the impacts of burning fossil fuels. In January, the U.S. Supreme Court turned down an appeal to review the suit, clearing the way for Big Oil to finally stand trial for decades of deception. Honolulu’s lawsuit is one of many currently moving through U.S. courts that accuse big polluters of lying about climate change to hamper the energy transition. Just one month into Donald Trump’s new presidency, a cohort of organic farmers and environmental groups sued the U.S. Agriculture Department for scrubbing climate change references from its website, including data and interactive tools. The purged information was used by farmers to plan for climate risks like heat waves,…