“Ethical Markets highly recommends this commonsense path to a cleaner, greener, inclusive and knowledge-richer future from our two Canadian colleagues, global pioneer founder of Cleantech, Nicholas Rhode Parker and Toby Heaps, founder of Corporate Knights, both based in Toronto. Enjoy!
~Hazel Henderson, Editor“
Our best shot at building back
better after the COVID crisis
By Toby A.A. Heaps
Spring 2020 • Corporate Knights • 5
The COVID crisis and the climate crisis have a lot in common.
Both are mortal threats to humanity, butthe coronavirus has the urgency of a bullet coming at our heads, whereas the climate crisis is a slower burn (albeit increasingly pro ne to blazing flare-ups).
With the coronavirus, time is compressed into minutes, hours, days and months. What we do today can determine if our families, neighbours and communities get deadly ill in the next 14 days. That temporally compressed line that connects our actions to their life-saving impacts has spurred governments around the globe to make the tough decision to lock down their economies and bring the engine of capitalism to a shuddering halt.
With the climate burn, the time scales are longer. If we throw water on the fire today, it could take decades or centuries before the flames are doused.
How to solve this riddle of time? For wisdom, I turned to my friend Nick Parker.
Nick is the prophet of “cleantech.” He coined the term in 2002 and helped catalyze an ecosystem that has since moved mountains of money ($150 billion of venture capital and
private equity at last count) to develop cheap and sustainable solutions the world now appears ready to adopt.