Oil companies have come under increasing legal scrutiny and face allegations of defrauding investors, racketeering, and a wave of other lawsuits. But a new paper argues there’s another way to hold big oil accountable for climate damage: trying companies for homicide. The striking and seemingly radical legal theory is laid out in a paper accepted for publication in the Harvard Environmental Law Review. In it, the authors argue fossil fuel companies “have not simply been lying to the public, they have been killing members of the public at an accelerating rate, and prosecutors shou ..read more

Life is full of mysteries, and the federal budget for 2023 is one of them.   Contrary to what people might think, the federal budget tells us precious little about what the government is actually spending money on this year when it comes to clean economy incentives, or anything else for that matter.  After last year’s budget, I submitted a media request asking the Department of Finance and the Ministry of Environment and Climate Change how much they were set to spend to address the climate crisis in 2022. The official response was a shoulder shrug. To find out what is actually g ..read more

An array of new tax credits for clean energy development and a pledge to secure Canada’s place in a global green economy are at the centre of this year’s federal budget, released Tuesday afternoon by Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland, with an estimated $80 billion in multi-year funding for mostly clean energy technologies. In what may be a first for a federal budget in Canada, the document includes an RBC Economics chart that shows electricity from solar and wind costing less than natural gas. “As electricity becomes the main source of energy, daily and seasonal dema ..read more

The Canadian financial industry needs to lead the wind-down of high-carbon assets, but more regulation would help it along the way. As the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) highlighted last week, we are in the midst of a climate emergency. At the same time, Canada’s financial system continues to pump billions of dollars into fossil fuel developments. This cannot continue if we are realistically going to achieve the goals of the Paris Agreement and keep global warming below 1.5°C. Canada needs to adopt a package of financial regulations that will drive down carbon emissions and s ..read more

In Canada, 2022 will go down as the third-worst year for weather-related insurance losses in history – so far. Catastrophes spanned the country, from late-winter storms in the Atlantic provinces to Manitoba’s spring flooding, Ontario/Quebec’s derecho windstorm in May, summer storms on the Prairies, Hurricane Fiona in September, and B.C.’s “king tide” winter storm in December. Aware that climate change is increasing the severity and frequency of extreme weather, governments are developing strategies to mitigate the damage caused by future floods, hurricanes, wildfires, droughts, heat events and ..read more

For today’s investors, there is no more important question than this: How do you grow your capital in an economy that’s on the verge of drastic change?  Corporate Knights has been tracking the world’s largest companies and their commitment to sustainability for more than two decades. But only in the past five years have our researchers drilled down to calculate how much each company is actively investing in new, sustainable systems, such as renewable energy and green building materials.   The results: the best investments of the past three to five years turn out to be the compan ..read more

As our societies respond to the climate emergency, calls to “electrify everything” are mounting. Electrifying buildings and transportation and shifts to renewable energy are expected to play a central role in lowering our collective emissions. Yet this expectation comes at a time when the electric power sector has been rocked by several decades of disruption and renewal. As far back as the 1880s, traditional utility businesses created value by building and operating electric power plants and transmission lines to satisfy the instantaneous demand for power on a 24/7 basis. Technological advance ..read more

The clean energy transition has been powered by activists and innovators – but it can be achieved only when business leaders recognize that both prosperity and survival hinge on shifting their investment to low-carbon systems. With the costs of renewable energy now falling below the price of most fossil fuels, this day of reckoning is coming closer. But it’s not here yet – which is why Corporate Knights is publishing its second annual dashboard measuring the transition-readiness of Canada’s largest investors: its giant pension funds. Our new report, produced in collaboration with the Ottawa-ba ..read more

Let us borrow so we can build. That’s one of the messages from some 30 First Nations leaders travelling to Ottawa March 21 to push the federal government for more power to borrow money to finance infrastructure projects. The group comprises employees and members of the First Nations Finance Authority (FNFA), a non-profit, Indigenous-owned corporation that works with 151 individual nations to access capital markets to finance major projects that contribute to their economic development. The authority has a loan portfolio of close to $2 billion and has financed some of the largest commercial tra ..read more

A stark choice between climate stability and global devastation is the constant drumbeat from a landmark report released today by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). “The choices and actions implemented in this decade will have impacts now and for thousands of years,” the UN agency states in its Sixth Assessment Report, a final synthesis that brings together six in-depth science and policy reports dating back to October, 2018. “There is a rapidly closing window of opportunity to secure a liveable and sustainable future for all,” the IPCC adds. The science shows roughly h ..read more