Corporate Knights

Re: Who are Canada’s top international corporate citizens? At first glance your publication looked interesting and promising. But really?! Including Apple Inc. and Unilever PLC in your top 10 International Corporate Citizens is a travesty. Did your researchers not know that both these companies donate millions of dollars to the Trump organization, which has clearly said they want to remove 58 million acres of forest for building and construction, and open up Alaska to more drilling? And I could go on. How can we trust anything in your publication when you err on the side of the biggest enemy to the environment that there is? —Dr. Robin Alter, Toronto, ON CK: Thank you for your email and for your interest. While there is no perfect company, both Apple and Unilever…

As a form of property, the condominium is an exceptionally long-lived species, with evidence of buildings in ancient Babylon whose ground floors were owned separately from the rest of the structure. Despite the ancient pedigree, the view that prevailed over many subsequent centuries was that it made no sense to separate buildings into legally self-contained entities, much less divorce them from the land upon which they sat. After all, a building is a cohesive object, with common areas and infrastructure, as well as shared exposure to risks like fires or floods or deadbeat tenants. What could it mean to “own” the title to a cube of space in the sky that happens to be surrounded by walls and floors? All that began to change in the 1950s in Puerto Rico,…

For those most invested in the struggle to evade the worst effects of global warming, MethaneSAT carried high hopes. Built and operated by a subsidiary of the large U.S. non-profit Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), the satellite was created to provide a comprehensive global record of methane emissions and show the oil and gas industry how to stop leaking so much of this highly potent greenhouse gas into the atmosphere. Though not quite a silver bullet in the fight against methane emissions, it was something more like an effective and well-placed spy. But just over a year into its five-year mission, the satellite stopped working. On June 20, the boxy, solar-powered device passed over the North Pole and made a link with the High Arctic ground station in the Norwegian archipelago…

For decades, an 11-acre parcel of land outside Antigonish, Nova Scotia, served as the collection point for municipal garbage. After it shuttered in the 1970s, the plot, located on a quiet, wooded road near the town, languished. Then, an unexpected opportunity appeared. In 2020, the municipally owned company that runs Antigonish’s utility and those of two other Nova Scotia towns set out to develop three community solar projects for each of the three towns it manages. The residents of Antigonish hope to make their town one of Canada’s first net-zero communities. But to get the project off the ground, they needed space – and the idea of a solar farm offered the chance to give the former landfill new life. Since January, the Antigonish Community Solar Garden has been producing…

Heat waves and floods are killing people, the green power transition is under attack, AI technology is wasting energy and causing job losses, wealth is concentrated like never before, and oligopolies are driving up living costs. It’s no wonder morale is flagging and people are hungry for solutions to the era’s most complicated existential troubles. Increasingly, it seems they’ll be found only in a major economic reset. Small fixes aren’t enough to save us. Unsurprisingly, people of all political stripes are frustrated enough that radical shifts are no longer off the table. A compelling, positive economic vision for communities to rally around is critical, and two contenders are emerging in public debate: abundance and degrowth. Central to abundance is the notion that a key societal problem is scarcity driven by…

What would the economy look like if governments trimmed back bureaucracy to let innovators innovate? The opening pages of Abundance: How We Build a Better Future paint one vision. Authors Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson envision a Jetson-esque future: clean energy, lab-grown meat, new medical advancements, less time spent working, more time enjoying cheaper, eco-friendly intercity travel. The life described in the book is like today’s but run through an Instagram filter that shows a more bountiful world, and one that’s further down the green-energytransition pathway. If you haven’t heard about abundance yet, you probably will. The concept is having a moment and shaping policy discussions in North America and around the world. Titles like Klein and Thompson’s, Yoni Appelbaum’s Stuck and Marc Dunkelman’s Why Nothing Works all make versions…