3 ways to get Alberta on board with a 'just transition'

As with any climate policy in Canada, considering and supporting local, economic and social realities are crucial to making the plan politically justifiable in Alberta

BY BRENDAN BOYD AND MARIELLE PAPIN

FEBRUARY 16, 2023

Federal Natural Resources Minister Jonathan Wilkinson recently announced that “just transition” legislation is forthcoming that will help Canadian oil and gas workers move into jobs in the low-carbon energy sector.

The announcement set off a firestorm in Alberta as Premier Danielle Smith said: “It’s very clear what they have in mind for us is devastating. They want to shut down a quarter of our economy.”

Rachel Notley, the province’s official opposition leader, suggested the federal government should just take the legislation “…and basically get rid of it.”

Just transition is an important element of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberal party national climate policy agenda. It’s in line with the 2015 Paris Agreement, which Canada signed along with 193 other countries.

The agreement considers “the imperatives of a just transition of the workforce and the creation of decent work and quality jobs in accordance with nationally defined development priorities.” That means Canada’s national plan to address climate change and transition towards a decarbonized economy must consider and support workers.

Making policy lemonade out of lemons

Needless to say, the plan has had an inauspicious start, even though the details have yet to be revealed.

So how can the federal government salvage its just transition agenda and make policy lemonade out of the political lemon that is its relationship with Alberta?

It could be argued that Alberta, with its large oil and gas industry, is distinct from other provinces and territories and is unlikely to support any plan for a just transition.

But in the past seven years, the federal government has been able to work with provinces and territories, including Alberta, using three strategies that can increase the chances of bringing the province on board with the just transition plan.

3 ways to win support

First, the federal government has allowed substantial flexibility in local policy design. For example, provinces could accept a federal carbon pricing policy or develop their own equivalent policy, using a tax or a cap-and-trade system.

While Alberta’s United Conservative Party government has fought the carbon price on fuel tooth and nail, it has quietly worked with the federal government on a pricing system for industry. Even when the UCP government changed the provincial system, upon coming to power, the federal government recognized its equivalency.

Similar flexibility and attention to local circumstances will be required if the just transition is to be politically accepted in Alberta. Simply including the province in a broader national transition strategy isn’t sufficient.

Second, the federal government offered trade-offs in return for provincial support. In Alberta under Notley and the NDP, provincial support for federal climate policies was contingent on approval of the Trans Mountain Expansion Project, despite its greenhouse gas emission (GHG) footprints and the opposition of environmental groups.

The federal government can look for additional trade-offs, particularly if Notley wins the provincial election in May. Potential options include increased support for the clean-up of abandoned oil and gas wells, investments in the province’s hydrogen industry and increasing financial incentives for carbon capture, use and storage technology.

Finally, the just transition plan itself must present a financial carrot to accompany the stick of a cap on GHG emissions in the oil and gas sector, which was announced last year.

Federal enticements

The federal government has provided funding, financial incentives and investments to entice provinces and territories to back national policy goals and help them meet federal regulatory requirements.

But historically, there has been a gap between what Alberta deems to be fair and necessary support for its industry and what the federal government is willing to shell out. The just transition is an opportunity to bridge this gap in expectations.

The federal government’s fall 2022 economic update planned for $250 million for skills training for jobs in low-carbon energy industries. However, the $2-billion figure floated in the federal Liberals’ 2021 election platform is likely closer to the mark.

In addition, the support of industry was key to the viability of Notley’s provincial Climate Leadership Plan. The federal government should take advantage of the reality that many in the oil and gas industry desire and accept the need for a transition to sustainable jobs.

The path forward

Is the just transition plan dead on arrival or is there a path to salvaging this key component of national climate policy?

As is often the case with public policy, the devil will be in the details.

As with any climate policy in Canada, considering and supporting local, economic and social realities are crucial to making the plan politically justifiable in Alberta. Doing so will also help the policy achieve equity and justice.

The stakes are high, and Canada and Alberta cannot afford to see the plan fail. The frequency and intensity of natural disasters worldwide in the past few years, and a shrinking market for fossil fuels, have already spurred the transition.

Canada has no choice but to adapt its energy sources and industries.

As the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act in the United States shows, other countries have started to take this path. If Canada doesn’t plan for it, the inevitable transition will be much more disruptive — and much less just.

Brendan Boyd is an assistant professor at the Department of Anthropology, Economics and Political Science at MacEwan University. Marielle Papin is an assistant professor in political science at MacEwan University.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Canadian oil and gas industry is actively lobbying against its net-zero targets: report

A new report by InfluenceMap accuses fossil fuel companies of ‘greenwashing’

BY SHAWN MCCARTHY

FEBRUARY 27, 2023

The Canadian oil and gas industry is engaging in greenwashing by endorsing a 2050 net-zero target while actively lobbying against measures that would achieve that climate goal, international non-profit InfluenceMap says in a report.

U.K.-based InfluenceMap – which is funded by major foundations in Europe and the United States – analyzed the climate policy engagement of the six largest oil and pipeline companies headquartered in Canada, as well as the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP). It scored them on three key issues: whether they advocate for fossil fuel expansion; whether they advocate for increased subsidies; and whether they oppose emissions regulations.

“Despite the Canadian oil and gas sector's widespread use of net zero commitments and narratives, the industry remains strategically opposed to science-based policy to deliver net zero targets in line with limiting warming to 1.5°C,” the report said.

The InfluenceMap report builds on the work of an expert panel established by United Nations Secretary General António Guterres and chaired by former federal environment minister Catherine McKenna. The expert panel report said companies’ net-zero commitments are credible only if they support effective climate regulations in their lobbying and other policy engagement.

McKenna echoes the InfluenceMap criticism of Canadian oil and pipeline companies.

They “continue to advertise that they're committed to net zero while lobbying against the climate action needed to make this goal possible,” she told Corporate Knights. McKenna stressed that companies are failing to significantly invest in the technology solutions that they espouse, despite their record profits in 2022. Meanwhile, they’re hiking dividends and share buybacks.

Pathways Alliance, which represents the largest oil sands producers, has laid out a plan that it says will cut emissions by 20 megatonnes by 2030 and achieve net-zero emissions in its operations by 2050.

The group has launched a major advertising campaign touting its climate plan, including frequent television spots. However, McKenna argues that it cannot be taken seriously until the companies allocate major capital spending to it and align their executives' compensation to provide incentives for environmental improvement. Suncor, which InfluenceMap ranked as a leader among Canadian companies, recently announced it has appointed as its new chief executive Rich Kruger, former CEO at Imperial Oil Ltd., which received the lowest marks in InfluenceMap’s ratings.

In a pre-budget submission to the Commons finance committee released in October, CAPP said it supports “the Government of Canada’s desire to create a path for meeting its international climate change objectives.” It criticized specific measures – such as the proposed cap on oil and gas emissions – as unworkable and uneconomic.

Image courtesy of InfluenceMap.

However, the InfluenceMap analysts conclude those commitments lack credibility. “The Canadian oil and gas sector is generally positioned against ambitious climate policy action” needed to meet the long-term targets the companies say they support, the report said.

The International Energy Agency and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) “have stressed the need for decisive policy interventions by governments in order to drive the energy transition and emissions reduction,” Sofia Basheer, the author of the report, said in an email.

“Most of the pathways recognized by the IPCC to get there involve substantial reductions in fossil fuels,” she said.

CAPP argues that, while the oil and gas emissions cap would force industry to cut back its production, other global producers would pick up the slack, resulting in no reduction in global emissions. The industry argues it should be encouraged to increase production if it can achieve emissions intensity lower than the global average.

The InfluenceMap report also notes that Canadian companies are lobbying for more government support to finance their adoption of the key technologies needed to reduce emissions in their operations, especially the use of carbon capture and storage (CCS).

Most of the pathways recognized by the IPCC to get there involve substantial reductions in fossil fuels.

–Sofia Basheer, analyst with InfluenceMap

In its pre-budget submission, Pathways Alliance calls for an expansion of the tax credit proposed by the federal government to cover operating costs as well as initial construction costs. It also urged Ottawa to adopt a “contract for differences” plan that would amount to an insurance policy to protect its investment if a future government scrapped the carbon tax or failed to follow through on planned increases.

In response to the InfluenceMap report, Cenovus Energy reiterated its commitment to reduce GHGs from its operations by 35% by 2035 and achieve net-zero emissions by 2050. "This will help ensure Cenovus remains resilient and can play an important role as the world moves toward a lower-carbon future,” the company said in an emailed statement. Cenovus said it reduced its methane emissions by 520,000 tonnes in 2021, and captured the equivalent of 90,000 tonnes of CO2 from its initial CCS facilities.

In statement, CAPP rejected the greenwashing charge. "Any pathway to net zero includes the efficient use of Canadian oil and natural gas," the association president Lisa Baiton said in an emailed statement. "Given this, we absolutely believe there is space in the global market for Canada's responsibly produced oil and natural gas production."

The InfluenceMap report notes that the IPCC has urged governments to end fossil fuel subsidies in order to hasten the transition to non-emitting energy sources. The call from Canadian oil companies for government support is “misaligned with IPCC guidance on fossil fuels,” it said.

The report noted that the industry has employed dubious narratives to argue for continued buildout of fossil fuel infrastructure and productive capacity, even though greater production of oil and gas would undermine Canada’s effort to achieve its international climate commitments. Those narratives include the claim that greater production of Canadian oil and natural gas could actually reduce global emissions and that it is needed to secure global energy security in the face of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

All told, the InfluenceMap report suggests that the Canadian oil and gas industry remains far behind the curve – and even behind some of its European competitors – in taking the actions that the world needs to avert the most disastrous impacts of climate change. High-level corporate commitments need to be backed up with aggressive government regulations that speed up the pace of change.

Corporate Knights publishes the world's largest circulation magazine on clean capitalism.

Ontario and Alberta are building natural gas plants despite lower costs of renewables

A new report found wind energy is cheaper than gas-fired power in both provinces. So why are they still leaning on gas?

BY MITCHELL BEER

FEBRUARY 8, 2023

Photo by Gary Goldberg/Flickr

Wind and solar farms with battery backup are both cheaper to build than natural gas power plants in Ontario and Alberta, and the price of the renewable options is expected to fall another 40% by 2035, concludes a report released last week by Clean Energy Canada (CEC).

“Even without carbon pricing, wind power is set to be 40% cheaper than gas-fired power in both provinces by 2030,” the report states. “Solar power, meanwhile, is already cheaper than natural gas power in Alberta and is on track to be 16% less expensive by the end of the decade.”

With storage added, wind and solar are “still highly cost-competitive with natural gas.”

The study, based on analysis by Dunsky Energy + Climate Advisors, comes at a time when both provinces are planning to add new gas plants to their electricity grids — and both will be using a lot more electricity, as vehicles and home heating switch from fuels to electricity. While the grid operators in Ontario and Alberta are both “investigating pathways to a net-zero power grid,” CEC points to a fatal flaw in their analysis — they rely too often on obsolete data that may go back as far as 2001, or draw from experience in other countries.

When Dunsky built a set of “bottom-up cost curves” for each province, said report co-author Evan Pivnick, CEC’s clean energy program manager, they showed that “in most cases renewables are cost-competitive or vastly cheaper, depending on how you treat the carbon tax,” while storage batteries “are competitive today, not theoretically down the road.”

Renewable energy now

With new federal regulations expected to mandate a net-zero grid by 2035, “we need to be doing everything possible to mitigate any new emitting electricity generation, which means preventing to the greatest extent possible any new natural gas building,” he added. So while the report doesn’t tell provinces not to build fossil gas plants, it does urge them to “properly examine the cost to get that same electricity and reliability through other means.”

Those decisions are happening right now, and they carry very high stakes.

“Because power plants typically operate for decades, the choices made today will have substantial ramifications for 2035 and beyond,” Clean Energy Canada writes. “Building new natural gas-fired power plants means locking in emissions—and costs—for many years to come. There is also the risk that fossil fuel infrastructure is retired before the end of its economic lifetime and becomes a stranded asset—a liability taxpayers would likely pay for.”

The report notes that Ontario is currently planning to install 4,000 megawatts of electricity capacity between 2025 and 2027, including 2,500 MW of storage and 1,500 MW of new gas plants, to fill the gap when the province’s aging nuclear plants go offline for refurbishment. The looming electricity shortage was made worse by the Ford government’s ideologically-driven decision to cancel 758 signed renewable energy contracts and rip a fully-built wind farm out of the ground after it took office in 2018.

As a result, carbon pollution from the Ontario grid is expected to increase 375% from 2017 levels by 2030, and 600% by 2040. The province added 7,152 MW of new renewable capacity, mostly solar and wind, between 2010 and 2017, but just 466 MW between 2017 and 2023.

The Alberta grid is coming off a surprisingly fast shift from coal to natural gas, the report says. Provincial legislation calls for a 30% renewable grid by 2030, and renewables have grown from 9% to 22% of grid capacity in five years.

But while “Alberta has the potential to lead Canada in wind and solar deployment by 2025,” CEC writes, “increasing its share of renewables will ultimately require long-term energy storage and transmission solutions to meet the needs of Albertans year-round.”

While the report shows how tough it will be for new gas plants to compete with new utility-scale renewables, Pivnick acknowledged that the analysis was limited to onshore and offshore wind, solar photovoltaics, and four- and eight-hour batteries. That means it left out decentralized or “behind-the-meter” options like community solar, demand response, and energy efficiency that are already cutting into the demand for new generation.

Late last month, the Snowmass, Colorado-based Rocky Mountain Institute urged U.S. grid planners to include distributed solar and storage in their models, at a time when one major rooftop solar company says customers are “banging down our door” to get installations done.

The choices made today will have substantial ramifications for 2035 and beyond.

- Clean Energy Canada

With limited time to get the study done, Pivnick said the first priority for the Dunsky project was to gather current, local data. As result, “we may very well be understating the true benefits,” he acknowledged.

“What we’ve seen in other jurisdictions is that as renewable energy, as batteries, as hybrid systems get deployed, there’s a learning curve where utilities realize they can provide a better suite of services and benefits, not least of which is a more distributed grid mix that’s more resilient to weather events. There’s an inherent resilience in the [less centralized] grid that is never costed in at this point.”

As an initial point of reference, “the cost input is a key consideration, but just one,” he added. “Given significantly cheaper ability to produce energy, that’s something that even on its own should lead us to ask how we maximize deployment.”

But the report warns that a clean electricity system “is not inevitable.” It urges governments and grid authorities to invest in wind, solar, and a stronger, more flexible grid; provide the policy certainty and incentives needed to attract investment, including the federal government’s upcoming Clean Electricity Regulations; remove barriers to adoption by supporting storage alongside renewable supply; and use up-to-date data to drive their projections of future potential.

“Natural gas plants are incredibly expensive to build and operate, and this report shows that wind and solar, when combined with storage, can do the same job for far less,” Ontario Clean Air Alliance Chair Jack Gibbons told the Toronto Star. “It makes no climate or economic sense to build gas plants when we’ve got these cleaner and lower cost options to keep the lights on.”

This article is republished from The Energy Mix. Read the original article.

Corporate Knights publishes the world's largest circulation magazine on clean capitalism.

Canada's Imperial reducing contractor workforce at Kearl oil sands project

Story by By Nia Williams • Yesterday 

(Reuters) - Canada's Imperial Oil Ltd is reducing the number of contractors working at its Kearl oil sands site in northern Alberta as part of measures to cut operating costs at the project, a company spokeswoman said on Monday.

Imperial is deferring some non-critical work or moving it off site, spokeswoman Lisa Schmidt said, adding the company has not laid off any employees.

There is no impact on oil production at Kearl, a 240,000 barrel-per-day bitumen mining project that has been operating since 2013.

Schmidt declined to say how many people would be impacted but said Imperial is trying to maintain an average of 2,000 people on site at Kearl and the company is currently above that level.

Calgary-based Imperial, majority-owned by Exxon Mobil Corp, has 5,300 employees, not including contractors, according to company filings and earlier this month reported record annual earnings in 2022.

Imperial's decision echoes a move from rival oil sands producer Suncor Energy Inc, which last November announced it would cut 20% of its contractors in mining and upgrading operations to help improve site safety.

(Reporting by Nia Williams; Editing by Chris Reese and Marguerita Choy)

 

The race to mine mining waste

Could metal-eating bacteria that break down mining waste be key to sustainable battery minerals?

BY JOHN LORINC

JANUARY 9, 2023

Photo by Photomaru

For generations, the topography of Sudbury, Ontario, has been brutally defined by towering slag heaps and vast orange-hued tailings ponds – the physical legacy of almost 140 years of nickel mining and smelting by resource giants like Inco and Falconbridge. By 1910, in fact, Sudbury’s mines were supplying 80% of the world’s nickel. But by the late 20th century, the industrial fallout – corrosive air pollution, acid rain and a legacy of seemingly intractable contamination – revealed the extraordinary environmental cost of those resource riches.

Fast forward to April 2022, when BacTech, a publicly traded Toronto remediation firm, launched plans to use naturally occurring bacteria and a “bioleaching” process to break down some of that mining waste and recover what it claims are billions of dollars in nickel, cobalt, green iron and sulphur that have long been buried in those tailings. Nickel and cobalt are now highly sought-after minerals in the accelerating race to build electric vehicle batteries, and this venture seems to offer a double climate bonus: remediation of a highly degraded landscape, as well as raw materials for transportation technology that weans society of its addiction to fossil fuels.

“The timing is right to mature these technologies off the bench,” says Laurentian University microbiologist Nadia Mykytczuk, interim president and CEO of MIRARCO (Laurentian’s Mining Innovation, Rehabilitation and Applied Research Corporation) and an advisor to BacTech. “The rapid electrification and move to battery electric vehicles is going to drive a lot of innovations, and bioleaching is one of those that will move forward quite quickly now.” A feasibility study has been completed, and a pilot facility, the Centre for Mine Waste Biotechnology, is being built on the Laurentian campus.

Mykytczuk points out that the notion of using microbes to essentially poop out recoverable minerals from tailings waste isn’t new, and has been applied for decades in settings like Chile’s copper mines. Over time, however, the processes have become more sophisticated; the demand for better forms of remediation, more intense. Acid drainage, a corrosive by-product that’s released from tailings ponds, continues to contaminate downstream watersheds. Tailings dam disasters in the past decade or so in countries such as Hungary, South Africa and Brazil have not only shone a harsh light on the grave human and ecological risks associated with accumulated mining waste, but also sparked activist investor groups, like the Church of England, to push for safer practices.

At the same time, the global growth of renewable energy and the push to electrify has revealed the extent to which fossil fuel extraction will be replaced in the coming decades by the dramatic growth in the mining of ores like nickel, copper or rare earth elements used in wind turbines and other clean technologies. Global demand for copper is projected to double by 2035, even as existing copper mines become less and less productive. Earlier this year, the International Energy Agency estimated that the global mining sector needs to build 60 nickel mines, 50 lithium mines and 17 cobalt mines by 2030 to meet global emissions goals.

But if all that new mining activity generates even more emissions, contaminates watersheds and produces mountains of toxic waste, we’ll have merely replaced one form of resource-driven environmental destruction with another. Case in point: the mining of lithium, a critical ingredient in EV batteries, consumes huge quantities of water, pollutes groundwater and poses a danger to flamingo habitats.

Conventional mining is not only energy intensive and ecologically scarring; it is also extraordinarily inefficient. By weight and volume, valuable ores like nickel, gold or cobalt account for a tiny fraction – sometimes even less than 1% – of all the material removed from a mine. (A sustainable-mining scholar in Chile has trenchantly described these epic inefficiencies as akin to using five kilograms of beef from a 500-kilo cow and discarding the rest.) What’s more, the structure and financing of the industry is such that individual mining companies traditionally produce only one or two substances; everything else is seen as waste.

From an emissions perspective, one of the core arguments in favour of biomining and remining (another approach to recovering marketable minerals from tailings) is that huge amounts of energy have already been consumed to extract, crush, separate and process all the material that comes out of a mine. “The total energy required for bioleaching is significantly lower by several orders of magnitude than if you were to build a high-energy smelter,” says Mykytczuk.

To date, biomining remains a tiny fragment of the industry, but the potential has garnered attention from researchers, cleantech start-ups and established mining giants. For example, Teck Resources and Rio Tinto, both global firms, have teamed up with researchers at the University of British Columbia and other organizations to launch a project called M-MAP, or the Mining Microbiome Analytics Platform. The organization is building a genome library of microbes found in tailings ponds around the world, which will allow labs to sequence genetic material to engineer bacteria that is essentially tailor-made to digest minerals in particular tailings ponds.

As a Teck spokesperson explains, “M-MAP is the first integrated online platform which aims to extract the DNA from more than 15,000 mining site samples over the next two years to identify microbes that can be used to replace chemical and other legacy extraction methods for minerals and metals, and to perform safer, more effective remediation of legacy and operational mine sites.”
Bryne Gramlich, vice-president of business development at Allonnia, a Boston bio-engineering firm that is part of the M-MAP consortia, adds that while the project is in its infancy, the mining sector is “aggressively looking at how to accelerate the use of biology” in its reclamation efforts.

The rapid electrification and move to battery electric vehicles is going to drive a lot of innovations, and bioleaching is one of those that will move forward quite quickly now.

-Nadia Mykytczuk, interim president and CEO of MIRARCO

The critical question, of course, is whether the introduction of specially engineered microbes in tailings ponds, such as those enabled by M-MAP’s genome library, could further exacerbate environmental damage downstream of such facilities. “In order to get any type of technology like this approved and indeed used,” says Anita Parbhakar-Fox, an associate professor at Australia’s University of Queensland who runs a mine-waste-transformation research group, “a rigorous environmental impact assessment, including demonstration testing, risk evaluation and impact modelling, would be undertaken to ensure a decision on whether to use the technology was made based on a full evaluation of the socio-environmental risks.”

But Radhakrishnan Mahadevan, a professor of chemical engineering at the University of Toronto and a Canada Research Chair specializing in bio-engineering applications, says there are existing techniques for ensuring that such microbes don’t have what he describes as “exogenous impacts,” such as increasing the risk of antibiotic resistance. “You can engineer the environment in such a way that the microbes do what you want them to do.”

The potential for using new technologies to upcycle mining waste has attracted other remining start-ups. Phoenix Tailings, a four-year-old Boston firm with venture capital backing, has developed a set of chemical processes to extract value from tailings, including rare earth elements, cobalt and nickel. According to co-founder Anthony Balladon, the firm’s business strategy with mine waste sites is to recover two types of materials: large volumes of inert bulk substances that can be used like aggregates in concrete production, and smaller volumes of valuable ores. To make the math work, he says, “we need both components.”

He points out that some waste sites are quite old and date to a time when there was little market for the metals that are now driving the electrification economy. “You often find that you have a tailings pile or tailings pond somewhere in Canada, Australia or the U.S. that has a higher grade of cobalt or copper or rare earths than what is currently considered the kind of grade for operating a new mine,” he says. “You have to find the right sites.”

Phoenix, Balladon notes, has tapped into an eager source of capital looking for sustainable solutions to mining waste and a way of averting tailings dam disasters. But global investor appetite for EV-related metals is voracious and also a major driver of these technologies. “It’s a very exciting time,” he says, noting that governments in Canada, the U.S. and Australia are all looking to invest in these approaches.

You often find that you have a tailings pile or tailings pond somewhere in Canada, Australia or the U.S. that has a higher grade of cobalt or copper or rare earths than what is currently considered the kind of grade for operating a new mine.

-Anthony Balladon, co-founder, Phoenix Tailings

Parbhakar-Fox agrees. “In Australia in the past three to five years, we have seen a great deal of state and federal government investment into the development of mineral processing methodologies, particularly to recover critical metals in order to grow this sector in Australia,” she says. “The University of Queensland is involved in a project to bioleach and recover [rare earth elements] from Mary Kathleen mine tailings, potentially containing AU$4 billion worth, as well as cobalt from the Old Tailings Dam and Savage River mine tailings [in western Tasmania].” BacTech sees even larger economic windfall from recovering copper and cobalt from the tailings in Sudbury – it estimates that there’s $27 billion in nickel alone sitting in those ponds.

Researchers say these processes also promise a climate benefit beyond energy savings. “The bioleaching process itself is carbon capturing,” says Mykytczuk. “We are capturing atmospheric CO2, and the bacteria fix that to their biomass [so] you can actually have an offset from your carbon cost in the bioleaching process. It’s a benefit on the carbon side of things.”

There is, of course, plenty of reason to be skeptical, not just about the science, which is nascent and not yet deployed at commercial scale, but also about the promise of alchemizing all that slag into valuable ore and billions of dollars in profits.

Yet advocates point out that emerging research and the climate imperative should be encouraging us to think differently about the largely unseen by-products of an extractive industry that hasn’t changed its ways in generations.

“Mining tailings and other mine wastes are multifaceted when it comes to the potential positive outcomes,” says Parbhakar-Fox. “Provided the mine waste has been well characterized and the right technologies are used to extract and recover the most value, there are positive outcomes for companies, the environment, the future, and for our governments to grow circular economy businesses. These are exciting times if we dare to dream and think outside the box.”

Corporate Knights publishes the world's largest circulation magazine on clean capitalism.

Zero: JBS's net-zero promises mired by deforestation links

The world's biggest meatpacking company committed to be net-zero by 2040, but it still faces frequent accusations that it sources meat from illegally deforested land

BY BERNARD SIMON

FEBRUARY 6, 2023

https://www.corporateknights.com/

Illustration by Joren Cull

The rap sheet against meatpacking companies is a long one. Cruelty to animals, exploitation of workers, degradation of the environment and anti-competitive practices are just some of the charges levelled against them over the years.

Firms such as Cargill, Conagra and Tyson Foods would all make worthy winners of a Zero award. However, we’ll opt this time for the largest of them all, Brazilian-owned JBS, which employs around 250,000 people in more than 20 countries. It’s hard to think of any business with a more eye-popping record of scandal.

JBS faces frequent accusations that it sources cattle and poultry from illegally deforested land in the Amazon and the Cerrado, a vast swathe of grasslands in the east and south of Brazil. In 2022, the company admitted it had bought almost 9,000 cattle from farms belonging to notorious businessman Chaules Volban Pozzebon, who prosecutors have described as “one of the biggest deforesters in Brazil” and who is serving a prison sentence for conspiracy, extortion and illegal logging.

The company claimed it was the victim of a cattle laundering fraud and said it has since fired several of the executives responsible for this purchase, but the episode was just the latest in a string of reports linking the company to deforestation. A 2022 investigation by Repórter Brasil, a human-rights group, and Ecostorm, a U.K.-based investigative agency, concluded that JBS chickens fed with corn and soybeans grown on deforested land have ended up in British supermarkets.

And the shenanigans don’t end there. In September 2022, JBS agreed to pay US$20 million to settle a U.S. lawsuit alleging that it conspired with other meat producers to inflate pork prices. (Several of the other companies faced similar charges.)

JBS claims to be the first global meat company to commit to net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2040. However, it might be challenging for it to reach its climate goals, particularly after the company announced last fall that it’s pulling out of the plant-based market in the United States. And a study released by environmental groups last spring found that the company’s carbon emissions increased by 50% in the previous five years.

“We care about our role in the world and our responsibility as a global food company,” the company’s latest sustainability report proclaims.

True or not, JBS has much work to do to prove it means what it says.

Find out which company we crowned as the Hero of our 2023 winter issue. 

Corporate Knights publishes the world's largest circulation magazine on clean capitalism.

GEORGIA
Large-scale actions held in Tbilisi and Yerevan in support of Ukraine and against Russia. Video and photo

Anti-Russia protests

Marches and large-scale protests in Tbilisi and Yerevan marked the tragic date of February 24, exactly one year since the start of Russia’s military invasion of Ukraine. Video and photo reports from the two capitals.

YEREVAN

A torchlight procession was held in Yerevan in support of Ukraine under the slogans “Armenia without Putin”, “Russia is the enemy”.

One year since the beginning of the war in Ukraine. Chronology of main events

A year since the beginning of Russia’s war on Ukraine. Tens of thousands of killed, cities destroyed, war crimes. Chronology of war in Ukraine

TBILISI

“The war has claimed thousands of lives, and Putin will bring more grief upon the world for the sake of imperialism. Our rally is one of solidarity. We must understand what consequences the defeat of Ukraine would have for us. Armenia would become a Russian province,” Garegin Chukaszyan, one of the organizers, said.

In front of the Russian embassy in Yerevan, a poster depicting Russian President Vladimir Putin was burned to cries of “Farewell, filthy Russia!”.

The war in Ukraine one year on, what is has changed in Georgia

Hundreds of Russian media clones still operating in Europe

Zelensky calls Aliyev. Comment from Baku

Ukraine, Armenia/Azerbaijan, Iran are among the dangerous conflicts in 2023

TBILISI

Several thousand gathered on February 24 for a rally of solidarity with Ukraine near the parliament building in Tbilisi under the sloga “This is Georgia – Glory to the Heroes!”

Photo: JAMnews / David Pipia



Ukrainians who left their country and now live in Tbilisi marched along Rustaveli Avenue and joined the protest in front of the parliament.

Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko addressed the rally participants from a monitor installed on the stage. “You know better than anyone what Russian aggression is, what suffering, death and destruction it brings. How Russia is trying to occupy neighboring countries. We honor the memory of 36 brave Georgians who died for Ukraine since the beginning of the full-scale invasion of Russian barbarians,” he said.

The names of the Georgian fighters who died in Ukraine were read out and their memory was honored with a minute of silence.

Photo: JAMnews / David Pipia


The speakers criticized the Georgian authorities for their “treacherous position towards Ukraine and their people.” The leader of the opposition Strategy Agmashenebeli party, Giorgi Vashadze, evoked thunderous applause when he said that “contrary to the pro-Russian position of the authorities, with this action of thousands of people, Georgia has shown the whole world that it stands with Ukraine and its place in NATO and the European Union.”

Photo: JAMnews / David Pipia

Photo :JAMnews / David Pipia