A curation of recent articles in the media invite a SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) analysis of action by investment, industrial, insurance, and service enterprises to mitigate the disastrous effects of climate events like those that the people of the east and west coast of Canada have endured.
Environmental racism in Nova Scotia
Matt Galloway, of the Current on CBC Radio, interviewed Tom Rand, managing partner at ARK turned Venture Capital and the author of The Case for Climate Capitalism, and Christine Bergeron, president and CEO of Van City, a credit union in British Columbia. Galloway asks if the pension fund leaders are in a bind if there is a moral imperative to not destroy the planet, but their job is to make sure that my pension is taken care of?
An investment fund manager has a fiduciary obligation to maximise long term returns for their beneficiaries. There's two kinds of arguments, as Christine just pointed out. One is that investment managers are beginning to realise that there is a boatload of money to be made in this transition to a low carbon economy. This is the biggest economic opportunity of the 21st century. The other, more nuanced argument I would make, though, is that pension funds have an obligation, as you say, to meet their beneficiaries' needs, sort of 20, 30, 40 years from now if we head into three degrees and four degrees. I'm sorry, is Mad Max the economy? You know, to think that the economy is going to keep growing and that we can meet those obligations, financial obligations many decades out and of the world you're dreaming of. And so I would argue there's actually a fiduciary obligation on behalf of the industry as a whole. No single pension fund can do it by themselves, but as a whole, they have a responsibility to help solve this problem because if you don't solve this problem, the economy is not going to be running the way we expect it to in 20 or 30 years.1
Megan O'Toole and Jillian Kestler-D'Amours, of Al Jazeera, report on the fight to end environmental racism in Canada and Nova Scotia that has been the result of putting industrial development ahead of the health and welfare of marginalized communities. In the article, Ingrid Waldron, Canada’s preeminent expert on the topic and author of There’s Something In The Water: Environmental Racism in Indigenous & Black Communities, says rural and isolated areas are most affected.
whose book on environmental racism was the basis of a 2019 documentary co-directed and co-produced by actor Elliot Page, has spent years documenting the phenomenon in the province. She serves as executive director of the Environmental Noxiousness, Racial Inequities and Community Health (ENRICH) project, which has mapped the proximity of dozens of waste disposal sites and other toxic industries to First Nations and African Nova Scotian communities.2
A report By Simran Chatha outlines plans involving the private sector to mitigate the effects of rising seas that threaten Canada’s Atlantic and Pacific Coasts.
As for Canada, the report indicates that the country “does not yet have a strategic planning framework or standard classification of approaches for coastal risk management.” To properly build and maintain future flood mitigation measures, the report recommends Canada develop a set of national standards to support a consistent evaluation of nature-based solutions compared to infrastructure solutions, develop national monitoring standards for these solutions and to build the capacity to fund nature-based projects in the private sector.3
Tom Perkins, in an article for the Guardian, reports on the math of confusion as McDonald’s avoids the bold step of cutting beef offerings to reduce GHG emissions. Jennifer Molidor, a senior food campaigner with the Center For Biological Diversity points to the absence of menu changes needed to significantly reduce beef production and emissions in McDonald’s plans.
“One of the main signs that something is ‘greenwashing’ is that it’s not clear or transparent,” she added…McDonald’s “net zero” by 2050 pledge has also been criticized because such plans can allow polluters to continue emitting high levels of greenhouse gases over the next decades. To offset emissions that companies continue to produce, “net zero” programs often rely on carbon offset schemes – which have been the subject of multiple investigations pointing to flawed carbon calculations and uncertain impacts – as well as carbon capture technology, which is expensive and not yet operating at scale. Though McDonald’s plans and metrics are complex and controversial, they hold high marketing value because they give the appearance to the layperson of real progress, Molidor said. “McDonald’s is taking advantage of people who don’t understand this kind of math,” she added.4
Significant players in the market economy have identified strengths for their enterprises in the upcoming low carbon environment. Our role as individuals is to highlight the weakness and threats to these organizations of delayed action.
References
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