Tyler Hamilton's Blog

On a cold and blustery day in March 2011, a massive, 80-metre-tall wind turbine at Iberdrola’s 149megawatt Rugby Wind Power Project in North Dakota suffered a catastrophic mechanical failure. Some bolts let go and the entire rotor assembly, along with all three blades, crashed to the ground. No one was hurt; there was no contamination, no cascading grid impacts and no lasting effect on the local economy. The other 70 turbines were shut down immediately; technicians inspected each of their roughl...

On a sunny September afternoon in 2023, the Laura Maersk sat stationed in the harbour of Copenhagen, dwarfing everything around her. With a gleaming blue prow, colourful nautical flags and the words “ALL THE WAY TO ZERO” blazed across her forecastle, Laura prepared to set forth across the Baltic Sea: the world’s first container ship to run on green methanol.

The Laura Maersk says a lot about her country of origin. Denmark, the Nordic nation of some six million people, is a leader in clean techno...

Even before Donald Trump took office and declared his war on renewables, the wind industry was fighting an uphill battle. The Biden administration helped fast-track low-carbon energy in the United States, but other factors like persistent inflation, supply chain challenges and rising interest rates – exacerbated by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine – changed the economics of once-promising wind projects.

Adding insult to injury, Trump has moved to roll back funding for the industry, tried to halt new...

“Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centres of energy and daring, those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.” – Robert F. Kennedy

Since I was a teenager, this has been my favourite quote. It hits home with the message that everything we do matters, and that, like the butterfly ...

I’m one of those Canadians who put a flag on their house this year.

I’ve never bought a Canadian flag before. But I surprised myself when the daily Trump “51st state” insults ignited a desire in me to fly our country’s colours. Given how long the flag and flagpole I wanted were out of stock at Canadian Tire, it seems that many other Canadians felt the same.

This month’s avalanche of “year in review” articles on the Trump presidency (one down, three to go!) was a reminder of just how unprecedente...

The current anti-ESG wave in the United States may recede, but the damage to shareholder democracy it leaves in its wake could persist for decades.

In December, U.S. Senator Ted Cruz introduced legislation that would block voting on environmental, social and governance (ESG) and diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) matters for the federal pension fund. The bill would prohibit BlackRock and State Street from exercising their voting rights as shareholders on matters related to the Thrift Savings ...

Since taking office, Donald Trump and his officials have conducted a swift and ruthless campaign to cancel U.S. climate policy and replace it with a patronage system tailor-made for the fossil fuel industry. These measures run the gamut, from billions in cancelled wind contracts to new coal subsidies, vast drilling licences for oil and gas companies, and so on.

Scarcely a week passes without another handout to add to the pile.

Most of this work has involved undermining anything that promotes ren...

As the global economic transition accelerates, more companies are recognizing that sustainability isn’t just good marketing – it’s good for business, too. The global effort to align our economic systems with the planet’s carrying capacity has lately acquired newfound urgency. We need to transition faster.

This was the animating spirit of the new methodology behind the Corporate Knights Global 100 ranking. The revised methodology introduces “sustainable revenue momentum” to measure how fast compa...

Imagine this: you’re in the shower, you reach for a new bottle of shampoo and you crack it open, just like a soft drink.  

The idea occurred to Nick Paget, co-founder and chief innovation officer at Meadow, a packaging technology company headquartered in Stockholm. While he couldn’t quite imagine a consumer going for that kind of a shampoo container, he was on to something. The result is the Kapsul technology – a new but familiar user experience that turns the ubiquitous aluminum can into a vess...

This article originally appeared on The Tyee, an independent, online news magazine from B.C.

On a sunny afternoon last August, Trans Mountain CEO Mark Maki donned a black jumpsuit to stroll atop a giant loading dock in Burnaby. Below, his company’s new pipeline pumped oil into tankers bound for the open ocean.

“We’re returning money now to the owner,” Maki said in a Global News segment. “Canadian taxpayers who are the shareholders of the system are reaping those benefits.”

It seemed that Canada...