GREENWASHING

Nova Scotia Power increases use of biomass for generating electricity

NOVEMBER 24, 2021 BY JENNIFER HENDERSON

A look inside the blast furnace at Nova Scotia Power’s biomass plant, photo courtesy Ray Plourde

A boiler owned by Nova Scotia Power on the grounds of the Port Hawkesbury paper plant is burning 35% more woody biomass this year than last. 

The year-to-date figures show 126,810 megawatt hours (MWh) of electricity was generated over the first nine months of 2021 compared to 93,934 MWh for the same period in 2020 and 65,891 MWh in 2019. 

The information is contained in monthly fuel cost reports Nova Scotia Power must make to the Utility and Review Board, which regulates how much consumers ultimately pay for electricity.

Burning biomass  — which includes everything from low-grade pulpwood to bark, shavings, and wood chip waste from sawmills — for the purpose of generating electricity is only about 22% efficient. Nova Scotia Power’s boiler at Port Hawkesbury supplies about 3% of the total electricity used in the province. 

Citizens concerned about climate change have for years opposed the government classifying biomass as “renewable energy” because clearcutting, which releases carbon from the ground, remains the dominant form of harvesting on Crown and private land. That’s despite ongoing work to begin implementing 2018 recommendations from Professor Bill Lahey to move toward a more ecological approach. 

In May 2020, after it became obvious renewable hydroelectricity from Muskrat Falls was going to be delayed yet again, the McNeil government passed an Order-in-Council extending until December 2022 the deadline to generate 40% of electricity from renewable sources. 

To help with the shortfall, Nova Scotia Power was told to “maximize” its use of biomass at both the facility it owns in Port Hawkesbury and another one in Brooklyn owned by its parent company, Emera.

In a letter to Nova Scotia Power dated May 15, then-Energy Minister Derek Mombourquette added: “Nova Scotia Power shall also maximize the use of dispatchable renewable electricity from its own facilities, as well as those of renewable electricity power producers in Nova Scotia (excluding COMFIT generation sources).” 

Emera’s Brooklyn Energy biomass generator new Liverpool. Photo: Jennifer Henderson

By definition, “dispatchable” excludes wind and hydro sources, which are not available 24/7. Nova Scotia Power claims the only “dispatchable renewable electricity power producer” in the province is Brooklyn Energy, the 35 MW biomass plant near Liverpool. 

The government capped at $7 million a year how much electricity Nova Scotia Power could buy from its affiliate company. Critics of the deal — such as auditors hired by the regulator and the province’s consumer advocate — say electricity generated by Brooklyn is the most expensive power and question why the province would burden ratepayers with its purchase.

The answer became apparent in September 2020 when then-Intergovernmental Affairs Minister Kelliann Dean appeared before the legislature’s standing committee on Natural Resources and Economic Development to praise the Order-in-Council for helping rescue the forestry industry four months after the closure of the Northern Pulp mill. 

“The change to Renewable Energy Standards (May,2020) is enabling Nova Scotia Power to generate more electricity from wood chips and sawmill residuals by operating two biomass plants at capacity until electricity from Muskrat Falls comes onstream,” she said. “We are using all the policy levers at our disposal to support the sector.”

Nova Scotia Power is not required to report to the UARB how much electricity is being produced or how much biomass is being burned at Brooklyn Energy. The company pleads “commercial confidentiality” when asked by The Halifax Examiner. 

Nova Scotia Power does report how much it spends each month to buy power from independent producers — a small group which includes Brooklyn but excludes all wind farms. That dollar amount has also increased over the past year — from $15.9 million for 10 months ending October 2020 compared to $23.3 million for 10 months ending October 2021. Unfortunately, the lack of transparency makes it impossible to know exactly how much of that increase is attributable to purchasing more biomass.

Radio silence

The current Minister of Natural Resources and Renewable Energy ,Tory Rushton, has the authority to reduce the amount of biomass being burned to generate electricity and by extension, the rate of clearcutting.

With a stroke of the pen, the PC government of Tim Houston could issue another Order-in-Council capping the amount of metric tonnes that could be used in the boilers, or, direct Nova Scotia Power to use biomass only when it is the most economical fuel choice. 

But so far, Rushton has not responded to the Halifax Examiner’s question about whether he intends to make any change to stop “maximizing” the use of biomass to produce electricity.

 The Examiner isn’t the only one pushing the Minister for answers to difficult issues. At noon today, Citizens opposed to a controversial clearcut on Crown land near Rocky Point Lake in Digby County will stage a demonstration outside the Department of Natural Resources and Renewable Energy on Hollis Street. The protest led by members of Extinction Rebellion and the Healthy Forest Coalition is to pressure the government to take action to protect the habitat of the mainland moose, an endangered species that ranges overs the Crown land currently being cut by the Westfor consortium. 

Mainland Moose. Photo: Nature Nova Scotia

A court decision has upheld the legal right of the company to harvest wood on the Rocky Point Lake parcel but protestors claim the province still has “a moral obligation” to protect the moose and its habitat.

Finally, Dalhousie University has recently awarded a three-year contract to JD Irving and Wagner Forest Management to supply biomass for its boiler at the Dalhousie Agricultural campus in Truro. Burning biomass that is harvested sustainably to supply a local heating system is a more efficient alternative. The key is whether the suppliers can verify the wood has been harvested sustainably in the first place.

“The product is all sawmill residue from two local sawmills,” said Stephanie Rogers, a spokesperson for Dalhousie University’s Agricultural campus. “Sproule Lumber owned by Irving is just 10 km away and will supply 75% of the total. The plant will consume between 20,000 and 21,000 tonnes of biomass annually. The heat will be used on campus and the boiler should generate about three quarters of our electricity. The price will be based on the moisture content of each truck load but the annual average cost is projected to be in the range of $52-$54 a tonne.”

About Jennifer Henderson

Jennifer Henderson is a freelance journalist and retired CBC News reporter. email: jennifer@halifaxexaminer.ca

 

Are companies with purpose-driven pledges accounting for slavery?

We need to do away with business management tools rooted in slavery to create a human-centred economy

BY SHILPA TIWARI

NOVEMBER 16, 2021

CORPORATE KNIGHTS
NOVEMBER 16, 2021

Illustration by Karsten Petrat

The past 24 months have seen a significant increase in calls for social justice, and the business world has not been exempt. The public is demanding that companies be better corporate citizens, that they move people and the planet from the periphery to the core of how businesses operate. There’s no denying that a fundamental shift is happening. We saw it with BlackRock CEO Larry Fink’s 2019 Letter to CEOs, which famously declared that corporate “purpose is not the sole pursuit of profits.” Businesses are now expected to have an aspirational reason for being that extends beyond delivering profits to shareholders.

Despite the increased demand for purpose-led businesses, many corporate leaders continue to miss the mark on how to embed purpose into their organizations’ DNA. They’ve learned how to say the right things; they have been less effective at actually co-creating a better society. It may be tempting for a corporation to slap a statement of purpose on its website without transforming its business practices, but employees and customers are increasingly holding companies accountable for not following through. Big-ticket charitable donations for Black Lives Matter or encouraging employees to volunteer in their local community may make for feel-good headlines, but without deeper change they risk being derided as tokenistic marketing ploys – as was the case with a Pepsi ad pulled for co-opting the BLM protest movement.

To uncover why many companies are failing to embed social purpose into their business, we have to unpack the foundational systems used to do business, so much of which in North America is built on an economic system founded on slavery. In many ways, 21st-century business models echo the slave practices of generations past – so much so that we now call the worst corporate practices in distribution warehouses, on fishing vessels, in cocoa plantations and in sweatshops “modern slavery.”

The most striking parallel between slavery and contemporary business management can be found in the “task idea,” which 19th-century management pioneer Frederick Winslow Taylor described as “the most prominent single element in modern scientific management.” The task system is closely identified with Henry Laurence Gantt. Born to a slave-owning family in Maryland, Gantt developed a “task and bonus system,” which paired a flat task and a time wage with bonuses for overwork. It has a much longer history beyond Gantt and Taylor, and was one of the principal methods of organizing labour under slavery.

Management tools can separate us from our humanity.

—Caitlin Rosenthal, author, Accounting for Slavery

Contemporary business leaders are still trained to see “bonuses” as an essential management tool to reward overtime. The concept has been entrenched in our work culture across industries and has rarely been called into question. In the apparel industry, for instance, the concept typically drives the use of “piece rates,” where workers are often paid less than the legal minimum wage to try to meet gruelling production targets.

In addition to his task and bonus system, Gantt also developed a horizontal bar chart to track every worker’s progress for the day. The Gantt chart is still a popular scheduling tool, though business textbooks rarely highlight the slavery-era roots of these management systems.

“Our management tools can separate us from our humanity,” Caitlin Rosenthal told the Harvard Business Review. Rosenthal, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of Accounting for Slavery: Masters and Management, studied account books from American plantations and found that slave owners developed management tools that are still in use today, including depreciation and standardized efficiency metrics – tools that “help maximize the value and the surveillance of human capital.”

“If you want to use those metrics for different purposes, then it’s going to be a difficult job,” Rosenthal added, calling it an “uphill battle to turn metrics produced to reveal profit into something that can help us to be more humane.”

Perhaps, then, we shouldn’t be surprised that today’s corporations are struggling to add social purpose on top of existing structures. That wasn’t the purpose of the modern corporation – companies aren’t built to be socially driven.

Fishing for change

In an era where employees and customers expect more from businesses, it may be time to reconsider how we incentivize labour. Giving employees an opportunity to make a difference at work, providing a platform that allows each employee to express their individual capability, and ensuring a collaborative environment to achieve more than each employee could do on their own are all things today’s business leaders must now see as a core element of their management strategy. Combining compassion with accountability can go a long way to creating a psychologically safe workplace and motivating teams.

Instead of a bonus program based on efficiency or overwork, how about a profit-sharing or stock-option plan? That was the thought process of Eileen Fisher, a pioneering designer who responded to an emerging contemporary feminist sensibility that demanded easy-to-wear professional clothing. In the 1980s, Fisher started a clothing company that shared her name, and as her success grew, she thought about what would happen to her company after she retired. At first, selling seemed like the best option. She tested out the viability of an IPO: “I remember being up on stage and looking out at a roomful of men in suits – no women wearing my clothes, no conversation about clothes. It was all about the numbers. It was really just about the money,” she told CNN last year.

Knowing that investor-controlled, capital-focused companies hinder leaders’ efforts to adapt to a world of finite resources and growing inequality, Fisher decided to sell shares to employees instead of going public, and today 40% of the company is held by its employee stock ownership plan (ESOP). Her decision allowed her to keep her company’s actions aligned to its purpose. Eileen Fisher was also one of the first clothing companies to offset 100% of its carbon footprint, and it’s become a pioneer in advancing localized, sustainable production.

In a world that is dynamic and hyper-connected, and where companies are being held accountable not only for outputs but, more importantly, how those outputs are achieved, are organizational charts still relevant? Employees often have hybrid responsibilities that make it difficult to categorize them on an organization chart. Shifting a business’s structure toward one that drives profit through purpose is an evolution that will require fundamental operating and cultural changes, and it’s a difficult first step to navigate.

Purpose-driven companies are thriving

One of North America’s original purpose-driven companies, Dr Bronner’s, has become a leader in the personal care industry, with more than US$120 million in sales annually, by staying true to its original mission of serving people and the planet. In Honor Thy Label, a book released earlier this year, the company’s vice-president of special operations, Gero Leson, details the challenges of building – and ethically scaling – organic, fair trade and, most recently, “regenerative organic certified” agricultural supply chains across the Global South when those supply chains did not yet exist. The company motto of “all-one!” has permeated its business model in which social responsibility and environmental consciousness serve as uncompromising components of corporate structure, both in its global supply chains and at home in California. In a country where the median CEO-to-worker pay ratio exceeds 300 to 1, Dr. Bronner’s capped CEO salaries at five times that of their lowest-paid workers, who make a minimum wage of $18.71 an hour in a state where the minimum wage is $14.

You can call almost anything ‘purpose-aligned.’ We [prefer] ‘purpose-driving.’

-Maureen Young, director, Coast Capital Savings, Social Purpose Office

In Canada, where B.C.’s Coast Capital Savings is expanding its footprint, the credit union is leaning into social purpose, placing it firmly at the centre of its business strategy as it grows into a national organization. On top of the 10% in profits that Coast Capital Savings already invests into its communities, it’s applying a purpose lens to everyday business decisions, putting programs, initiatives and products into three categories: purpose driving (helping to advance the social-purpose economy), purpose neutral and purpose contra (or detracting from their mission).

“We initially used ‘purpose aligned’ as opposed to ‘purpose driving’ and quickly realized it was a weasel word,” says Maureen Young, director of Coast Capital Savings’ Social Purpose Office. “You could call almost anything purpose aligned. We eventually landed on purpose driving – placing an emphasis on maximizing purpose-driving actions and surfacing purpose contra and addressing them quickly.”

Corporate leaders that do the hard work of tying social purpose to all aspects of business with committed leadership and financial investment have generated sustained results, stayed relevant in a rapidly changing world, and deepened ties with stakeholders. The 2018 Global Leadership Forecast found that firms without a sense of purpose underperform the market by 40%, while purpose-driven companies outperform the stock market by 42%.

The future is tenuous but also ripe with opportunity for those who understand the need to truly connect with stakeholder expectations and are not afraid to turn business-as-usual on its head to create a human-centred economy. This may now seem like an option, but soon it will be the only way forward.

Shilpa Tiwari is executive vice-president of social impact and sustainability at Citizen Relations and the founder of Her Climb.

 

Canadian pensions are retiring fossil fuel investments

New pension research reveals Canada’s retirement savings are quietly offloading fossil fuels and onloading climate solutions

BY TOBY HEAPS, ED WAITZER AND DEREK EATON

NOVEMBER 10, 2021NOVEMBER 10, 2021

For decades, Canada’s collective retirement savings have been heavily steeped in the fossil fuel sector. In recent years, climate-conscious investors, lawyers and activists warned that many of Canada’s pension funds were risking our future by continuing to pursue investing strategies that keep us on the pathway to catastrophic climate change. But tectonic shifts are happening behind the scenes even at Canada’s most conservative pension plans, as sustainable investing gains momentum worldwide. New research reveals that sustainable investing is becoming a key strategy for Canada’s largest pension fund managers.

Twelve of Canada’s biggest pension funds were analyzed by Corporate Knights, in partnership with the Smart Prosperity Institute and The Natural Step Canada. Over the past decade, these funds have quietly unloaded their fossil fuel stocks as their values have plunged, to the point where they now make up less than a few percent of total investments. Canadian pension portfolio exposures to fossil fuel stocks are down to a 10th of what they were 10 years ago, notwithstanding some controversial private equity investments.

For instance, the two largest funds in Canada (Canada Pension Plan and Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec) have slashed the value of their fossil fuel holdings by more than 90% over the past 10 years, from more than 22% of total equity investments to less than 2% and 3% as of September 20, 2021.

On the flip side, we found that collectively, their self-defined environmentally sustainable investments have gone from negligible to more than $150 billion – 7% of their total assets – over the last few years.

Many pension funds are also taking a more active role with the companies they invest in, engaging on environmental, social and governance (ESG) issues ranging from board gender diversity to responsible lobbying and payment of taxes. Similarly, many funds are making efforts to improve their own governance by increasing management diversity. This involves aligning their own executive bonuses with ESG targets and increasing ESG competency on their boards.

Pension funds represent a major pool of Canada’s investment capital: the top 12 funds alone control $2.1 trillion, roughly equivalent to Canada’s entire GDP. Many stakeholders – governments, businesses, non-profits like Shift Action for Pension Wealth and Planet Health, and certainly beneficiaries – are increasingly interested in how pension funds are addressing the challenge of the transition to sustainability. A new tool called the Sustainable Investment Dashboard, developed by Corporate Knights with input from the Smart Prosperity Institute, The Natural Step Canada and a panel of experts, aims to highlight which pension funds are pulling their weight on these issues and which ones are falling behind.

As the transition to a climate-friendly economy speeds ahead, global investors are embarking on what is in all likelihood the largest reallocation of capital in our civilization’s history. This could be more than $100 trillion between now and 2050, according to Mark Carney, former governor of the Bank of England.

There still exists tremendous potential for pension funds to play an active ownership role in helping carbon-intensive companies leverage their assets to make the transition from “grey to green,” through initiatives like Say on Climate and Climate Engagement Canada. This engagement must be underpinned by an honest assessment of what kind of future companies are investing in. Many companies claim to be aligned with net-zero emissions, but if they are still plowing most of their growth investments into high-carbon assets, then net-zero is just a slogan.

Ziad Hindo, the chief investment officer for the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan (OTPP), told The Globe and Mail that Canadian pension funds need “a fundamental shift.” Some of Canada’s largest pension plans are realizing that they need to keep up with the pace of change and capture their fair share of clean-growth investment opportunities. They’ll need to boost their investments in low-carbon solutions to roughly 20% by 2025 and fully decarbonize across all asset classes. Given the multi-decade ripple effects of capital allocations made today, this will need to happen well before the 2050 net-zero target for the real economy.

This fall, Canada’s second- and third-largest pension fund managers raised the stakes, announcing plans to achieve net-zero emissions, and linked the objective to executive compensation at the funds.

In September, OTPP set targets to reduce portfolio carbon-emissions intensity by 45% by 2025 and by 67% by 2030, compared to their 2019 baseline. Critically, these targets impact all their assets across public and private markets, including external managers. The pension plan also committed to invest $5 billion in climate and transition solutions so far in 2021 and said they would boost their $30-billion portfolio of green investments.

Also in September, CDPQ updated its climate pledges to boost green assets from $36 billion to $54 billion by 2025 and achieve a 60% reduction in the carbon intensity of the total portfolio by 2030. The plan will also create a $10-billion transition envelope to decarbonize the main industrial carbon-emitting sectors and complete its exit from oil production (currently just 1% of its portfolio) by the end of 2022. Other pension funds are also developing net-zero action plans, which are not yet public. So this trend will almost certainly continue.

While it is encouraging to see the “Maple Revolutionaries” (as The Economist dubbed Canada’s large pension funds for their strong governance and performance track record) rising to the climate challenge, there is a risk that the lack of clear definitions and expectations could result in unnecessary costs, delays, lost opportunities and even risks to financial performance.
As the investment wave toward net-zero takes hold globally, now is the time to position Canadian pension funds (large and small alike) for success.

Toby Heaps is the co-founder and CEO of Corporate Knights.

Ed Waitzer is a lawyer and former chair of the Ontario Securities Commission.

Derek Eaton is the director of public policy research and outreach at the Smart Prosperity Institute. 

Putting out the fire: How to cleanly heat a cold country that’s hooked on natural gas

Thousands of kilometres of natural gas lines spidering under big city streets could soon become stranded assets

BY JOHN LORINC

NOVEMBER 23, 2021

CORPORATE KNIGHTS
NOVEMBER 23, 2021

Illustration by Jack Dylan

Electrify everything. Over the past year, this mantra has become a rallying cry for many climate watchers, who argue that a critical step to achieving reductions in carbon emissions is to first transition huge fossil-fuel-intensive systems – transportation, space heating, et cetera – to electrical power. Then, with sufficient investment in renewables or nuclear energy, an expanded greener grid can provide the energy required to keep the economy moving.

The process is called fuel switching. As technologies such as electric vehicles and electric heat pumps gain market acceptance, fuel switching seems increasingly plausible. “We have to do this really, really quickly,” says Simon Fraser University adjunct professor Chris Bataille, a climate policy analyst with IDDRI (L’Institut du développement durable et des relations internationales/Institute for Sustainable Development and International Relations), a Paris-based think tank.

In a cold country, the opportunities around the electrification of space heating in particular are critical. Heating and cooling buildings accounts for 12.4% of Canada’s carbon releases, but in some big cities, such as Toronto, natural gas used to heat buildings accounts for half of all emissions. (Nationally, 45% of all natural gas is used for residential and commercial buildings.) The reason? Thousands of kilometres of natural gas lines spider under big city streets, and the gas they carry, in some jurisdictions, is cheaper than electricity.

Decarbonizing using electric space and water heating

Though large swaths of Canada are hooked on natural gas, it’s become quite straightforward for consumers to switch to high-efficiency electric space and water heating. Heat pumps are widely available through home reno retailers or HVAC contractors. According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), 20 million heat pumps were purchased globally in 2020. “Growth is evident across all primary heating markets – North America, Europe and Northern Asia,” notes the IEA. “Although heat pumps have even become the most common technology in newly built houses in many countries, they meet only 5% of global building heating demand.” Across Canada, there are almost 800,000 heat pumps, and those totals have risen steadily for a decade, especially in Ontario and Quebec, according to Canada Energy Regulator data.

However, there are few policy incentives or regulatory mechanisms designed to accelerate the shift from natural gas to electric heat, so the decision remains, primarily, a consumer choice. In Canada, homeowners can access federal green-energy retrofit grants or subsidies to help cover the cost of these devices. Heat pumps range from a few thousand dollars to more than $10,000, depending on home size and other factors. High-efficiency gas furnaces run from $3,000 to more than $6,000; gas distributors also rent them. Stepped increases in carbon pricing will narrow the gap between gas and hydro rates by hundreds of dollars. Heat pumps, moreover, yield energy savings because of their efficiency.

Gas utilities continue to invest hundreds of millions of dollars each year in expanding and renewing gas distribution infrastructure.

-Bryan Purcell, vice-president of policy and programs, The Atmospheric Fund

One of the daunting financial impediments in the take-up of electric space and water heating has to do with the issue of stranded assets. If governments created incentives for homeowners or building managers to switch to electric heat, what happens to all the capital investment that’s gone into building gas distribution networks over the past 30 years? After all, in some regions, energy regulators sought to convert home heating to natural gas beginning in the 1980s because it was cleaner than oil and coal. Today, those assets sit on the balance sheets of giants like Enbridge, and governments are reluctant to impose regulations that abruptly turn them into liabilities. (Enbridge’s latest financial statements value its gas mains and related services at $12.5 billion, equivalent to about 10% of the book value of its total assets.)

Yet the complexity of fuel switching extends beyond the balance sheet. If large numbers of homeowners moved to electric heat, they would place a huge amount of additional pressure on existing electrical grids, especially in cities during peak times, says Richard Carlson, director of energy policy at Pollution Probe. “I just don’t see how the electrical systems in an urban area can be upgraded,” he says.

The solution to this Rubik’s Cube requires regulatory innovation, investment in renewable generation, and a sense of urgency. “The first thing to do when you find yourself in a hole,” says Bryan Purcell, The Atmospheric Fund’s vice-president of policy and programs, “is to stop digging. Gas utilities continue to invest hundreds of millions of dollars each year in expanding and renewing gas distribution infrastructure, compounding the risk of stranded assets and related financial disruptions. They will continue to do so until there are clear enough policy signals for a transition off of fossil gas.”

The potential for using biogas

Purcell and others believe one near-term fix is for governments to mandate that gas companies increase the use of renewable natural gas (RNG), created using methane emissions from water treatment plants, landfills or agricultural waste. In B.C. since 2017, for example, regulators have allowed energy distributors to add up to 5% RNG to their natural gas. “Getting a significant share of RNG in the gas supply as rapidly as possible can extend the useful life of gas infrastructure without compromising our climate commitments,” Purcell says.

Some environmentalists disagree: “There may be a niche role for truly low-carbon biogas for things that can’t easily be electrified,” says Greenpeace Canada energy analyst Keith Stewart, “but when it comes to space heating, biogas represents an effort by incumbents to maintain infrastructure lock-in by blocking the alternative[s] that can achieve zero GHGs.”

Bataille and Carlson feel the real solution is structural. Progress on fuel-switching, they say, will come from combining electricity and natural gas policy and regulation into a single, integrated system focused on managing thermal energy so as to minimize emissions. “We have to stop regulating gas and electricity separately,” says Bataille.

Case in point: Gas distribution companies aren’t mandated to provide financial incentives for customers to replace end-of-life gas furnaces with electric heat pumps. However, in Quebec earlier this summer, Hydro-Québec and Énergir, a gas utility, announced a partnership to provide incentives to customers who rely exclusively on natural gas for heating to transition to hybrid systems. These use heat pumps that switch to gas in very cold conditions. (The efficiency of cold-climate heat pumps drops off at very low temperatures, particularly below -20°C.) The program is projected to cut carbon emissions from buildings by 540,000 tonnes by 2030. “Quebec is one of the first places doing this,” says Bataille.

Industry pushing back against bans on gas hook-ups

There are other important policy levers. For example, municipalities could require developers of new buildings to install all-electric heating systems instead of hook-ups to the gas grid. Beginning with Berkeley in 2019, municipalities in California, Colorado and Washington State, as well as parts of the U.K., have been banning gas connections for new-build structures.

Given that much of the built-form that will exist in 2050 hasn’t been constructed yet, such regulations represent high-impact emission reduction policies. But they’ve also attracted opposition from the gas lobby. According to a recent account in the Washington Post, pro-gas front organizations backed by the industry, as well as unions representing pipefitters and other skilled trades, have created war chests to fight these mandates.

In Canada, the Canadian Gas Association is also ramping up its own scare-tactics campaign: “Policy-driven electrification,” a brief warned, “could increase the total energy cost by between $580 billion to $1.4 trillion over the 30-year period between 2020 and 2050.”

University of Toronto Scarborough political scientist Matthew Hoffmann, co-director of the Munk School’s Environmental Governance Lab, says such reforms point to the importance of building social and economic constituencies around fuel switching. Measures like mandated disconnects, he says, “have the possibility of blunting political opposition.”

Pollution Probe’s Carlson, however, asserts that the real shortcoming isn’t the lack of adequate regulation, but rather the dearth of a thermal energy strategy that lays out the policy framework at a high level. Neither Ottawa nor the provinces have developed long-term plans linking the expansion of renewable electricity to fuel-switching incentives and gas disconnects. Not coincidentally, carbon reduction in Canada’s buildings sector has been stalled for years. As Carlson notes, even recent changes – new energy-efficient building codes, for example – will yield only modest improvements by 2030.

Time, of course, has become the enemy, especially in complex, interconnected systems like building energy, which depend on massive networks of infrastructure and therefore do not turn on a dime. For that reason, advocates say policy-makers must immediately begin designing and implementing policies that lay out a clear path to electric heat but don’t bankrupt the natural gas sector, whose distribution networks will still be needed to supply thermal energy to difficult-to-electrify sectors, like heavy manufacturing.

Hoffmann adds that governments should deploy all of these approaches instead of dabbling in pilot projects or incremental reforms. “We’re at the level of crisis where there isn’t time to be making that kind of choice anymore,” he says. “We’re in a both/and world now.”

Toronto journalist John Lorinc writes about cities, sustainability and business.

WAS DAVID COPPERFIELD IN FREMONT?

Tesla Factory In Fremont: Hundreds Of New Tesla Model S Disappear
Mark Kane 

The cars sat for months in a temporary location.

If you remember, earlier this year Tesla stocked hundreds of brand new refreshed Model S cars in a temporary parking lot in Fremont, California.

© InsideEVs Tesla Fremont 11/22 flyover (source: 在曠野遇見神)

They were sitting idle at the site ahead of the launch in June and remained that way after the launch for months.

We guess that such storage conditions are not the best for cars, or at least their paint, but the most intriguing thing was what was the reason for keeping the fleet of Model S, for which so many customers were waiting.

The first thought that comes to mind is the semiconductor shortage and lack of some key parts that prevented completing the cars for delivery.

The issue probably was solved as one of the latest flyover videos, shared by 在曠野遇見神, reveals an almost empty parking as of November 22.

It was later noted also by Sawyer Merritt:

"Teslas temporary Model S holding lot that was filled for months with over 400 Model S's is now almost empty, indicating Tesla has been ramping up its Model S delivery efforts & fixed the problem (if one even existed) that caused them to sit."

It's great news that Tesla is clearing inventory and ramping up production of the Model S (probably also the Model X).

Tesla currently offers two versions of the Model S and Model X cars (both with two wheel sizes that have noticeably different range):

Prices:

Model Base Price Dest. Charge Tax Credit Effective Price
2021 Tesla Model S Long Range (AWD) 19" $94,990 +$1,200 N/A $96,190
2021 Tesla Model S Long Range (AWD) 21" $99,490 +$1,200 N/A $100,690
2021 Tesla Model S Plaid 19" $129,990 +$1,200 N/A $131,190
2021 Tesla Model S Plaid 21" $134,490 +$1,200 N/A $135,690
2021 Tesla Model X Long Range (AWD) 20" $104,990 +$1,200 N/A $106,190
2021 Tesla Model X Long Range (AWD) 22" $110,490 +$1,200 N/A $111,690
2021 Tesla Model X Plaid 20" $119,990 +$1,200 N/A $121,190
2021 Tesla Model X Plaid 22" $125,490 +$1,200 N/A $126,690

Joel Trenaman: The Canadian lab that exposed a critical flaw that left Apple devices vulnerable

Citizen Lab identified a flaw that left Apple devices vulnerable to a 'zero-click' hack

Author of the article: Joel Trenaman, Special to National Post
Publishing date: Nov 28, 2021

PHOTO BY JACK GUEZ/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

On Nov. 23, Apple announced it is suing a global software developer following a security breach that left its operating systems vulnerable to surveillance. In September, Apple scrambled to issue a protective patch for a reported 1.65 billion devices that were vulnerable to the NSO Group’s notorious Pegasus spyware. How did Apple find out that it had been hacked? Canada’s Citizen Lab sounded the alarm.

NSO Group has licensed Pegasus to militaries, as well as intelligence and law enforcement agencies worldwide. Citizen Lab identified a flaw that left Apple devices vulnerable to a “zero-click” hack, in which malicious code can be planted on a device without any action by the user, that Pegasus had been exploiting.


Citizen Lab is an interdisciplinary human rights, security and technology research group founded in 2001. Part of the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy, examples of the lab’s focus areas include digital espionage, online freedom of expression, app privacy and security, and uses of personal data and surveillance tools.

The U of T group is not alone among Canadian academic and private institutional research groups, such as the Cyber Security Evaluation and Assurance Research Lab at Carleton University , which is exploring ways to protect Canada’s critical infrastructure from cyberattacks. The SecDev Foundation, the Waterloo Cybersecurity and Privacy Institute, Canadian Institute for Cybersecurity at University of New Brunswick and others also operate in this space.

What makes Citizen Lab stand out is how action-oriented it is at the confluence of public policy, rights, liberties and cybersecurity. One reason for this diverse approach is the background and skill set of its director and founder, Ron Deibert , who was first trained as a professor of political science, not a programmer or tech wizard.

The lab has a long track record of uncovering digital threats like the Apple attack. In recent months, it has also made headlines for exposing the use of Pegasus against New York Times bureau chief Ben Hubbard, and for a report analyzing how health data was used in the fight against COVID-19.

In today’s polarized world, another asset for Citizen Lab is that it’s difficult to detect any overt ideological or political biases. For example, its researchers thoroughly investigated both the hacking of Palestinian activists’ cellphones earlier this month (also via Pegasus), and what, in 2019, it dubbed “ Endless Mayfly ” — “an Iran-aligned network of inauthentic personas and social media accounts that spreads falsehoods and amplifies narratives critical of Saudi Arabia, the United States and Israel.”

Here at home, Citizen Lab has shown itself to be unafraid to apply the same even-handed approach and detailed critiques to Canadian public policy. For example, it has railed against the many forms of Chinese censorship, but went against the grain with a general conclusion on 5G that “Canada does not have a ‘Huawei problem’ per se.”

In September, in response to the federal Liberal government’s proposed online harms legislation (Bill C-36, which was at least temporarily scuttled by the election), Citizen Lab wrote a scathing submission to the Heritage Ministry, in which it called out what it saw as a “inadequate” consultation process, and an approach that will lead to “disproportionate levels of user censorship.”

It went on to call the draft regulation “an aggressive, algorithmic and punitive regime for content removal … without any substantive equality considerations or clear safeguards against abuse of process.” The authors also point to powers that would “explicitly deputize technology companies in the surveillance and policing of their users on behalf of Canadian law enforcement and intelligence agencies.”

This is the type of intelligent policy-making input that’s desperately needed in the current vacuum at the federal level. Governments everywhere are struggling to meaningfully protect privacy and curtail disinformation, without limiting speech, over-reaching on surveillance or curbing reasonable business interests. Yet governments simply don’t have the cutting-edge technological expertise found commercially or in the private sector and civil society. This is where an organization like Citizen Lab can play a major, forward-looking role.

Deibert told the Globe and Mail back in 2019 that the aforementioned Mayfly operation “may be a sign of things to come in an era when unsuspecting readers are increasingly preyed upon by far-flung factions out to manipulate the public discourse with disinformation spread by social media.”

Sound familiar here in 2021? There’s no end in sight to social media manipulation, state espionage, ransomware attacks and the like, and ideas like an international cyber arms control treaty seem laughable against the power of non-state actors. Now more than ever, we need independent, expert NGOs like Citizen Lab to identify and expose threats in the digital world.

National Post

Notorious Pegasus spyware faces its day of reckoning

The infamous hacking tool is now at the centre of international lawsuits thanks to a courageous research lab

Evidence suggests NSO’s Pegasus spyware has been used against human rights activists and journalists. 

Photograph: Amir Levy/Getty Images

John Naughton

Sat 27 Nov 2021 

If you were compiling a list of the most toxic tech companies, Facebook – strangely – would not come out on top. First place belongs to NSO, an outfit of which most people have probably never heard. Wikipedia tells us that “NSO Group is an Israeli technology firm primarily known for its proprietary spyware Pegasus, which is capable of remote zero-click surveillance of smartphones”.

Pause for a moment on that phrase: “remote zero-click surveillance of smartphones”. Most smartphone users assume that the ability of a hacker to penetrate their device relies upon the user doing something careless or naive – clicking on a weblink, or opening an attachment. And in most cases they would be right in that assumption. But Pegasus can get in without the user doing anything untoward. And once in, it turns everything on the device into an open book for whoever deployed the malware.

That makes it remarkable enough. But the other noteworthy thing about it is that it can infect Apple iPhones. This is significant because, traditionally, iPhones have been relatively secure devices and they are overwhelmingly the smartphone of choice for politicians, investigative journalists, human rights campaigners and dissidents in authoritarian countries.

Pegasus is so powerful it is classed as a munition and, as such, requires the permission of the Israeli government before it can be sold to foreign customers. And those customers, apparently, have to be governments. It’s not available as a consumer product. (The company insists it is only intended for use against criminals and terrorists.)
In a farcical turn, French government officials were allegedly in the final stages of contract negotiations to purchase Pegasus

And it doesn’t come cheap. We don’t know what the current price is, but in 2016 NSO was apparently charging government agencies $650,000 for the capacity to spy on 10 iPhone users, along with a $500,000 setup fee. Government agencies in the United Arab Emirates and Mexico are believed to have been among NSO’s early customers, but my guess is that by now there isn’t an authoritarian or despotic state anywhere in the world that’s not on the company’s books, despite NSO’s claim that it vets its customers’ human rights record before selling to them. And those governments – it can be assumed – make predictably heinous uses of it. Evidence suggests Pegasus has been used in targeted attacks against human rights activists and journalists in various countries, was used in state espionage against Pakistan and, most grisly of all, may have been used by Saudi Arabia to spy on contacts of murdered dissident Jamal Khashoggi.
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In a slightly farcical turn, at the same time that Emmanuel Macron’s iPhone was on a leaked list of potential targets for NSO spyware, it transpires that French government officials were allegedly in the final stages of contract negotiations to purchase Pegasus! The French have, needless to say, denied this, which only goes to support the old foreign correspondent’s adage that “you can never believe anything until it has been denied three times by the Élysée palace”.

Until quite recently, NSO was riding high. All that began to change at the beginning of this month when the Biden administration added NSO Group to its “Entity List” for acting “contrary to the national security or foreign policy interests of the US” and effectively banned the sale of hardware and software to the company. And last week Apple filed a lawsuit against NSO to hold it accountable for the surveillance and targeting of Apple users. The company is also seeking a permanent injunction to ban NSO from using any Apple software, services or devices. Needless to say, the Israeli government is up in arms about this, possibly because of revelations that phones of Palestinian human rights defenders have been “Pegasused”.

What’s mostly missing from coverage of these developments is that none of this would be happening had it not been for the skill, dedication and persistence of an extraordinary group of academic researchers at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Toronto. The school’s Citizen Lab was set up in 2001 by Ronald Deibert, a political scientist who realised that the world would need a way of digging beneath the surface of our global communications networks to uncover the ways that power is covertly exercised in its subterranean depths.

Over the past 20 years, Deibert has built a formidable team that functions, in a way, as a kind of National Security Agency for civil society. For years, it was the only place where one could get an informed picture of what NSO was up to and without the lab’s work – and the personal courage of some of its researchers – I doubt that the US would have moved against the company. But even if NSO now slides into insolvency, Pegasus will not disappear, because there are plenty of non-democratic customers for its capabilities. What the Citizen Lab has shown is that the price of liberty is tech-savvy vigilance.

'Amoral 21st-century mercenaries’: problems mount for NSO Group

Israeli spyware firm’s problems go from bad to worse as scathing Apple lawsuit follows US blacklisting

A woman uses her iPhone in front of an NSO Group building in Herzliya, near Tel Aviv. Photograph: Jack Guez/AFP/Getty Images

Stephanie Kirchgaessner in Washington DC
THE GUARDIAN
Fri 26 Nov 2021 

Shalev Hulio, the co-founder of Israel’s NSO Group, was in Washington DC on a mission to try to resuscitate the surveillance company’s battered reputation on Capitol Hill shortly before the news broke that he had probably arrived too late to make a difference.

With little advance warning to its allies in Israel, the Biden administration announced on 3 November that it was putting the spyware maker – one of the most sophisticated cyber-weapons companies in the world – on a US blacklist, citing use of the company’s software by regimes around the world for “transnational repression”.

“That’s how little they knew. Then, boom, this came out,” said one person familiar with the matter.

Since then, the news has gone from bad to worse for the company, which has long defended itself against critics by claiming that its principal surveillance tool – the Pegasus software that can penetrate phones and intercept encrypted calls and messages – is used by governments around the world to silently hack into the phones of criminals and suspected terrorists, and save lives.

This week Apple, the world’s largest technology company, became the latest to challenge that narrative when it accused NSO in a scathing lawsuit filed in California of being “amoral 21st-century mercenaries” whose tools had invited “routine and flagrant abuse”.

“For their own commercial gain, they enable their customers to abuse [Apple] products and services to target individuals including government officials, journalists, businesspeople, activists, academics, and even US citizens,” Apple said in its lawsuit. While NSO was busy “hiding behind their unnamed customers”, it was committing “multiple violations of federal and state law” as it developed and used – “or assisted others in using” – tools that had harmed Apple’s users, the lawsuit alleged.

The NSO Group chief executive, Shalev Hulio (seen in Tel Aviv), visited Washington DC to try to mend relations with the Biden administration. 

Photograph: Ammar Awad/Reuters

Hours after the lawsuit was filed, activists said Apple began sending threat notification alerts to alleged victims of state-sponsored hackers in Thailand, El Salvador and Uganda. Reuters reported at least six Thai activists and researchers who have been critical of the government received the notification.

At the same time, the credit rating agency Moody’s warned NSO was at risk of defaulting on about $500m (£375m) in debt, which would force the group into insolvency.

For Alaa Mahajna, a lawyer who for years has waged a lonely – and difficult – legal battle against NSO, the company’s barrage of bad news has been vindicating.

“NSO spent years dismissing any criticism and dodging accountability for human rights violations. It is very encouraging that most major tech companies and the US government now see the pernicious effect of NSO’s technology,” he said.

Mahajna represents Omar Abdulaziz, a Saudi dissident living in exile in Canada who experts at the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto have claimed was hacked in 2018, months before Abdulaziz’s friend, the journalist Jamal Khashoggi, was murdered in the Saudi embassy in Istanbul.

“As the first lawyer to bring legal proceedings against them, I am happy to see that these major actors are seeing what we saw four years ago. The atmosphere is definitely changing. It was and still is hard work for everyone involved, and some of us paid a price, but it is gratifying to see the tide turning,” Mahajna said.

There are other complications on the horizon. One person familiar with the matter said at least one bank working for NSO and related entities had voiced concern about its listing on the US commerce department’s entity list. A person close to NSO said its banking relationships were intact.

While placement on the list does not prohibit the provision of banking services, Kevin Wolf, a partner at law firm Akin Gump, said the listing did prohibit the transfer of any technology or software to the company from the US, a fact that generally made banks and other financial institutions who work for companies on the entity list nervous about the possibility that they could inadvertently fall foul of the rules over the normal course of business and provoke a response from the US government.

Another person familiar with the matter said Berkeley Research Group (BRG), a US-based consulting group appointed in August 2021 to manage the financial fund that owns a majority stake in NSO on behalf of its investors, consulted legal experts at the law firm McDermott Will & Emery to ensure its own work managing the fund did not inadvertently violate the entity list rules. It took those steps, a person said, as a matter of normal business practice and it is understood it received legal advice that the Biden administration’s actions did not prevent BRG from managing the fund’s NSO investment.

The main investors in the financial fund are US pension funds. A person familiar with BRG said it still had limited information about NSO’s decision-making.

Multiple media reports have suggested NSO is focused on trying to convince the Biden administration to remove the company from the entity list.

In response to the Guardian’s questions about its viability in the face of the developments, an NSO spokesperson said: “NSO Group remains strong, proud, and confident, and we will continue to provide technologies to help law enforcements catch paedophiles, terrorists and criminals.”

One person who spoke to the Guardian on condition of anonymity said the administration had been moved to act at least in part because of the number of US citizens who had been targeted using Pegasus in the past – including Americans living and working abroad.

NSO has denied its surveillance tools are used against US-based mobile phones.

The Pegasus project, a major investigation into NSO by the Guardian and other media outlets, which was coordinated by the French media group Forbidden Stories, reported in July that Carine Kanimba, the American daughter of Paul Rusesabagina, the imprisoned Rwandan activist who inspired the film Hotel Rwanda, had been the victim of a near-constant surveillance campaign by a government client using Pegasus in the first half of 2021. Forensic analysis of Kanimba’s phone, conducted by Amnesty International’s security lab, found it had been hacked multiple times while Kanimba, who is also Belgian and was living in Europe, was campaigning and lobbying for her father’s release.

In response to questions about Apple’s lawsuit this week, an NSO spokesperson said in a statement: “Thousands of lives were saved around the world thanks to NSO Group’s technologies used by its customers. Paedophiles and terrorists can freely operate in technological safe havens, and we provide governments the lawful tools to fight it. NSO Group will continue to advocate for the truth.”

Cooks, nurses and mall Santas in short supply in Canada


A sign that says "Sorry, not enough employees" hangs on the window of a restaurant called La Panthere Verte in Montreal, Quebec November 11, 2021 

(AFP/Anne-Sophie THILL)

Romain Beiso, owner of Chez Mere-Grand coffee, poses for a picture in Montreal, Quebec, November 10, 2021 as his business looks to hire a barista and chef 

(AFP/Anne-Sophie THILL)

A sign looking for employees is seen on the bakery Le Toledon in Montreal, Quebec on November 11, 2021 (AFP/Anne-Sophie THILL)


Michel COMTE, with Anne-Sophie THILL in Montreal
Sun, 28 November 2021

The signs of an unprecedented labor shortage in Canada are glaring: hospital emergency rooms closed because of a lack of nurses, restaurants skipping meals and fewer Santas in malls.

In Ottawa, a "Help Wanted" notice in the window of Corazon De Maiz restaurant -- like those in storefronts across Canada -- has gone mostly unanswered since the recent lifting of public health restrictions introduced 19 months ago to slow the spread of the coronavirus.

The end of Covid-19 lockdowns brought droves of customers to the capital city eatery, but with kitchen staffing levels down, the restaurant has been unable to meet the demand for burritos and tacos.

"We're suddenly busier, but we're having to close early because my wife and I are exhausted after working all day," owner Eric Igari told AFP.

One new hire worked three hours and quit, saying the job was too hard for not enough pay, Igari said.

"We've asked friends to pitch in, and even a few regular customers offered to help," Igari said. Two customers actually worked a few shifts.

- No 'ho ho ho' -

Studies by the government and industry associations found that up to two-thirds of Canadian businesses are facing worker shortages, and claim the deficit is limiting their growth.

The industries most affected are health care, food services, manufacturing and construction.

According to the latest from Statistics Canada, there were a total of 1,014,600 job vacancies in September, including 196,100 in food services and 131,200 in health care -- double the numbers from two years ago.

Trevin Stratton, a partner at Deloitte Canada, said factors contributing to the shortfall include an aging population leaving the workforce and lower recent immigration due to travel restrictions -- which Canada lifted in September.

Some sectors are adapting through the use of technologies such as increased automation in manufacturing, e-commerce in retail, or allowing staff to work from home.

But in others, "many workers might not necessarily yet feel comfortable working somewhere where their physical presence is required," Stratton said.

This is particularly true in the restaurant industry, which also shed workers fed up with the cycle of lockdowns and re-openings throughout the pandemic. "They're now looking for more stability," Stratton said.

With Christmas just weeks away, the trend has also impacted the supply of Santa actors usually hired for photos with children on their knee at shopping malls or professional mixers.

Jeff Gilroy of Just Be Claus said he's turned down 200 Santa gigs in Ontario. After large gatherings were banned last Christmas, he told AFP, "people are looking to have a Santa to make it a more festive Christmas."

Catherine Lacasse of the Professional Santa Claus Agency of Quebec said her province has ample Santas, "but we're struggling to find enough elves."

- Nurses' burnout -

"In health care, we've seen an exodus, particularly of nurses this year," Stratton said. "Some of that has to do with the stress of the job right now."

Lachine hospital in Montreal was forced to close its emergency room at night due to a "critical shortage of nurses," said spokeswoman Gilda Salomone.

Several others, she said, "are experiencing a major labor shortage that is limiting the quality and access to care."

Observers have suggested simply raising salaries to lure workers.

But Jasmin Guenette of the Canadian Federation of Independent Business (CFIB), said this "isn't an option for many small businesses still struggling to recoup pandemic losses."

"We see things slowly getting back to normal, going out to restaurants, for example, and we think that means businesses are doing well. But that's not the case. The impact of the pandemic was severe, and is still being felt," he said.

According to a CFIB survey, the average small business in Canada racked up Can$170,000 (US$135,000) in debts over the pandemic. And an estimated 180,000 businesses, or one in six, are now "at risk of closing."

Chez Mere-Grand restaurant in Montreal sought for 21 weeks to hire a cook and a barista. Its owner Romain Beiso explained that the hiring pool is smaller because many people now insist on a better work-life balance and job security found in other sectors.

"Our wages are not competitive because we cannot afford it," he also acknowledged.

Over at Hotel Place d'Armes, manager Benoit Pretet worries about being short 25 staff going into the holiday season.

"The clientele is back," he said, "but we can't open all our rooms."

amc-ast/caw/dw