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Good afternoon, and welcome to Globe Climate, a newsletter about climate change, the environment and resources in Canada.
The days are longer, the weather is warmer. It’s road trip season, and we’re promoting Canadian destinations.
This year, get outside the big cities to find charm and adventure with small-town escapes. Here are some noteworthy, under-the-radar towns worthy of a detour on your next road trip.
Now, let’s catch you up on other news.
Noteworthy reporting this week:
- Finance: RBC drops sustainable finance targets, blames anti-greenwash law
- Energy: Renewable energy touted as force for sovereignty in Canada’s North
- Politics: With environmental issues relegated to the backburner, Green Party found it difficult to gain traction with voters
- Technology: Alberta has a big vision to build massive AI data centres, but do they have the power to handle them?
- Pitching in: Founding Rabbit Rescue and foster homes in Ontario and Quebec
- Fusion Crossroad: General Fusion at financial crossroads in quest to build ‘break-even’ reactor
- From The Narwhal: What Carney’s win means for the environment and climate issues in Canada
A deeper dive
SAAM VOLTA, one of two electric tug boats in the SAAM Towage fleet, seen leaving its dock located in the Burrard Inlet on November 26, 2024.Alison Boulier/The Globe and Mail
Opportunity for the world’s foremost designer of electric tugboats
For this week’s deeper dive, we take a peek at a story from Report on Business Magazine
The marine industry has come a long way from its messy origins, but it’s still a dirty business. For Vancouver-based Robert Allan Ltd., the world’s foremost designer of electric tugboats, that’s a huge opportunity.
A few years ago, HaiSea Marine ordered three battery-electric harbour tugboats. It was a bold move. At the time, no one had yet built a fully electric working tug. HaiSea is a joint venture between the Haisla Nation and Vancouver’s Seaspan ULC, a marine conglomerate that operates tugs, barges, commercial ferries and a shipyard.
LNG Canada wanted the lowest-emission fleet possible to service its projects. The Haisla Nation, HaiSea’s majority owner, wanted the cleanest and quietest tugs available to protect the integrity of the Douglas Channel, a 140-kilometre-long corridor of dense coastal rainforest and waters rich with orca, humpbacks and other marine life.
Naval architect and marine engineering firm Robert Allan made it happen.
Robert Allan’s CEO, Michael Fitzpatrick (right), with project director and naval architect Mike Phillips. December 9th, 2024.Alison Boulier/The Globe and Mail
The first electric tug to ply the waters of the channel was the HaiSea Wamis. Now, along with its two sister tugs, the HaiSea Wee’git and HaiSea Brave, the three have been joined by a pair of Robert Allan–designed, dual-fuel LNG-diesel long-range escort tugs, the HaiSea Kermode and HaiSea Warrior.
Though hardly a household name, the 97-year-old, 100-employee company is “probably the foremost tug designer in the world,” said John Snyder, the New York–based managing editor at Riviera Maritime Media. Pick any major global port and you’re likely to find Robert Allan tugs – more than 1,000 are currently at work around the world.
In Vancouver, SAAM Towage, one of the Western hemisphere’s largest tugboat operators, headquartered in Chile, is running two smaller Robert Allan electric tugs.
Delivered last year, they’re used to assist bulk carriers taking coal from Neptune Terminals, co-owned by Elk Valley Resources, on the north shore and to service ships loaded with grain and crude oil.
The Volta, one of two electric tugboats in SAAM’s towage fleet, leaves the dock in Vancouver harbour November 26, 2024Alison Boulier/The Globe and Mail
The tugs’ battery maker, Corvus Energy, the world’s largest supplier of marine batteries, is also local. Although it is headquartered in Norway, Corvus was founded in Richmond, B.C., and still does its R&D, product development and some manufacturing there.
According to a 2024 Pacific Environment report, 50,000 large cargo ships emit roughly a billion tonnes of greenhouse gases each year – as much as 3 per cent of global CO2 emissions – along with “huge amounts of toxic particulate matter, acid gases and metals.” The five HaiSea and SAAM electric tugs eliminate about 7,500 tonnes of emissions annually – the equivalent of 1,500 combustion-engine cars.
Today, anyone with an interest in tugboats or marine decarbonization has their eyeballs on the low-emission maritime hub taking shape in Robert Allan’s own backyard.
Read the full magazine story today.
What else you missed
- Under Trump, clean energy stocks are outperforming
- In Canada’s High Arctic, scientists are on a mission to drill deep into climate history
- Supreme Court refuses to hear youth-led climate policy case, sending it back to lower court
- Canadian energy executives urge Carney to streamline project approvals, ditch emissions policies
Opinion and analysis
Grant Bishop, Keith LeBlanc and Brice MacGregor: The federal carbon levy is dead. Where to now for Carney’s climate plans?
Green Investing
Oil patch expects Carney to stand by ‘energy superpower’ pledge
If the new federal government truly wants to get Canadian oil and gas to markets other than the United States, Prime Minister Mark Carney will have to listen to the very real concerns of energy investors and either nix a host of regulations or form state-owned enterprises to build pipelines, says the head of one Canadian energy fund.
Carney’s pledge in his victory speech to make the country an “energy superpower” reflected the relatively pro-energy tone he took during the election campaign. “It’s time to build Canada into an energy superpower in both clean and conventional energy,” he told supporters.
The Climate Exchange
We’ve launched the next chapter of The Climate Exchange, an interactive, digital hub where The Globe answers your most pressing questions about climate change. More than 300 questions were submitted as of September. The first batch of answers tackles 30 of them. They can be found with the help of a search tool developed by The Globe that makes use of artificial intelligence to match readers’ questions with the closest answer drafted. We plan to answer a total of 75 questions.
Photo of the week
Puppeteers move cardboard animals at the Malibu beach in Dakar, Senegal on April 27, as part of "The Herds," a moving theatre performance that started its journey from the Democratic Republic of the Congo to the Arctic Circle in a bid to bring attention to the climate crisis.Sylvain Cherkaoui/The Associated Press
Guides and Explainers
- Want to learn to invest sustainably? We have a class for that: Green Investing 101 newsletter course for the climate-conscious investor. Not sure you need help? Take our quiz to challenge your knowledge.
- We’ve rounded up our reporters’ content to help you learn what a carbon tax is, what happened at COP29 and generally how Canada will change because of climate change.
- We have ways to make your travelling more sustainable, and if you like to read, here are books to help the environmentalist in you grow, as well as a downloadable e-book of Micro Skills - Little Steps to Big Change.
Catch up on Globe Climate
- Climate on the ballot
- Safe drinking water on the campaign trail
- Promising signs from whale calving season
- Nostalgic gardens make a comeback
We want to hear from you. E-mail us: GlobeClimate@globeandmail.com. Do you know someone who needs this newsletter? Send them to our Newsletters page.