The Power List: Climate – Macleans.ca

Governments are delaying emissions cuts. In Ontario, this 17-year-old activist is suing over it.
Sophia Mathur has been advocating for the environment since she was literally in the womb: her mother, Cathy Orlando, was pregnant when she was protesting against big fossil fuels in the 2000s. Mathur grew up in Sudbury, Ontario. At seven, she accompanied her mother to parliamentarians’ offices and Parliament and, at nine, to the Capitol, politely declining distracting trips to local zoos with her father. “At the time, I was obsessed with big cats and I thought: If we were more focused on solving the climate crisis, these animals would be saved!” recalls Mathur.

Your EV-Powered Logistics Company Is Taking Revolutionary Steps
Mark Ang tiptoed into the logistics industry during his years at the University of Toronto, when he and his friend Heindrik Bernabe launched a business that collected students’ things at the end of the school year, stored them, and brought them back. in September. After graduating, the couple expanded the model and created GoBolt, an urban delivery company powered by electric vehicles. Its climate-friendly approach is a game-changer, as demand for last-mile deliveries will increase by 78 percent globally by 2030. Innovation also drives its success: its fleet and routes are managed by proprietary software powered by GoBolt AI. In 2023, the company executed more than 175,000 electric vehicle deliveries for big names such as IKEA, Zara, Rove Concepts and Frank and Oak and now has logistics centers in nine of the largest cities in North America. And Ang continues to deliver: Forbes They recently named him to their 30 under 30 list.

For holding back against conservative prime ministers
To keep Canada on track to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050, Steven Guilbeault will have to do a lot, much of it against the will of Conservative prime ministers. Last year, it issued a carbon tax exemption on heating oil but not other forms of heating such as natural gas, resulting in backlash from western provinces and Premier Scott Moe withholding payments. of Saskatchewan’s carbon tax in February. Guilbeault later drew the ire of Alberta Premier Danielle Smith after revealing her plan for a cap-and-trade system next year to reduce oil and gas emissions. And, for good measure, he provoked Doug Ford—who wants to build a new highway north of Toronto—by saying there will be no more federal investment in big road projects.

He is publishing books to put out forest fires.
When fire weather, John Vaillant’s book about the 2016 Fort McMurray fire, hit shelves in May 2023, Canada was in the midst of the worst wildfire season in its history. The book may have seemed prophetic but, as Vaillant explains, the ferocious wildfires have been slow to come, fueled for decades by the fossil fuel industry. The message struck a chord with the readers and the New York Times named the book one of the 10 best books of 2023. In October, Parliament asked Vaillant to speak to a committee about Canada’s energy sector. Using the same biting and urgent language he uses in his writing, he described how the 500°C Fort McMurray wildfires, which spread at the speed of light, turned homes to ashes in five minutes. And he asked parliamentarians: why do we still depend on oil, a 19th century energy source, in the 21st century?

To clean fresh water production
As the Earth warms and rivers dry up, thirsty coastal populations are turning to the ocean. In 2018, some 16,000 desalination plants were operational in 177 countries. While that solves one problem, it creates another: the process has a huge carbon footprint. Seeking a cleaner solution, mechanical engineer Dragan Tutic founded Oneka Technologies in 2015, using the natural energy of ocean waves to create drinking water. The Quebec company now has a 6.5-meter-wide buoy that collects water from the ocean, desalinates it and delivers 50,000 liters a day. That’s only enough for 250 people, but using multiple buoys can increase production, and Oneka is working on a much larger unit that can provide water for an entire city.

It is devastating the energy sector.
Hydrogen could power much of our technology (cars, power grids, home heating systems, you name it) if it didn’t require so much carbon to extract. Enter Vichie, an Australian who co-founded the environmentally focused private equity firm Stonepeak. He has since left the company, but remains a big fan of renewable energy: in 2021 he founded EverWind Fuels and, two years later, bought three wind farms in Nova Scotia, with plans to convert them into the country’s first green hydrogen and ammonia plant. Canada. EverWind will contribute $1 billion to the project, and the federal government announced in November that it would lend Vichie’s company $125 million. Once operational in 2025, the plant will produce 200,000 tonnes of green ammonia each year, powering electrical grids and generating thousands of jobs for the province.

It’s making geothermal energy the next big thing.
We have long considered geothermal energy as a clean energy source, but no one has cracked the code to harness it on a large scale. As a result, it only accounts for 0.5 percent of the world’s energy. But John Redfern’s team at Calgary-based Eavor has big plans for Earth’s not-so-secret energy potential: They’re building two laterally interconnected wells in Bavaria, Germany, that will allow heat to circulate through a system closed-loop: a “huge underground radiator,” in Redfern’s words. And it’s 100 percent clean, running only on heat. Since the $325 million project will be completed in October 2024, when the First set of two circuits, Redfern wants to show people that geothermal energy can be a fundamental solution to our energy problems.

He is building the path to cleaner concrete
Last fall, Adidas made a splash by releasing 400,000 pairs of shoes with ink made from captured carbon material. Behind that collaboration is Calgary-based Carbon Upcycling Technologies, run by Sinha, who wanted to gain consumer acceptance for a bigger, if less attractive, part of his business: green concrete. In 2015, as a master’s student at the University of Calgary, Sinha discovered that captured carbon emissions could be used to reinforce concrete instead of plastics. By the end of 2024, his company, which recently raised $26 million in Series A funding, will join cement giants CRH Canada and Cemex UK. Sinha’s process can reduce the carbon footprint of these plants by double digits and improve the strength of concrete.

Your hyperlocal farming solution is growing
Bringing fresh products to the Far North is expensive and those costs are passed on to consumers. A bag of carrots, for example, costs three times more in Iqaluit than the national average. But during a trip there in 2015, Burke and Ellis, students at the University of Ottawa, had a genius idea: year-round hydroponic growing on site. Several years and 25 angel investors later, the duo’s company, Growcer, has 30 employees and their vertical farms, housed in 40-foot shipping containers, are operating in more than 55 locations across Canada, from Churchill in the Far North from Manitoba to locations further south, such as the Squamish Nation of Xwemelch’stn north of Vancouver and Muskoka in Ontario. So far, they have grown dozens of varieties of leafy greens and reduced product costs by up to 50 percent. Your next mission is sweet: strawberries.

He wants Canadians to breathe easy
In 2014, Yellowknife doctor Courtney Howard became an instant climate health advocate when her town was choked by nearly three months of wildfire smoke. Horrified, she used hospital, clinic, pharmacy and environmental data (and interviews with locals) to examine the effects of those fumes. The results were alarming: emergency room visits for asthma doubled and for pneumonia by 50 percent. Howard has since taken on leadership roles with the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment and the Global Alliance for Climate and Health. One of her top priorities: helping municipalities design clean air shelters (in community centers, libraries and other public buildings) that will be open to everyone when air quality worsens.

This story appears in the May issue of Maclean’s. You can buy the issue. here or subscribe to the magazine here.