Reporter Wendy Stueck thought a review into a B.C. company’s well-received plan to sell carbon credits to the world would be a relatively straightforward story. But the results of that review were anything but. Driven to investigate one company’s carbon-credit pledge, she began to see the forest for the trees. Today, we dig into the roots of that story – and, with the Edmonton Oilers out on a limb themselves, we track owner Daryl Katz’s search for the holy grail.
In the news
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- Ontario Premier calls on Ottawa to match U.S. tariffs on Chinese EVs
- Fidelity Canada receives approval to launch wealth-management dealer, plans to recruit advisers
Carbon credits
A B.C. company and a global crisis of faith
Domenico Iannidinardo, a senior leader at Mosaic Forest Management, works along the Cowichan Lake Main in March.Chad Hipolito/The Globe and Mail
In 2022, one of Canada’s largest timber companies made an announcement that won praise from politicians and environmental groups: Instead of logging all of its land, it would halt harvesting of old-growth forests on Vancouver Island and Haida Gwaii for at least 25 years.
The plan, Mosaic Forest Management said, would be to package the carbon stored in those trees into nature-based carbon credits – to be sold to global customers seeking ways to offset their own greenhouse gas emissions. It felt like a smart way into a growing market for the company and the heavily be-treed British Columbia.
The project appears as though it may be severely gerrymandered, protecting trees that were otherwise not at any risk.”
— Renoster report
Now, Wendy Stueck writes, the company is facing questions about whether those trees would have been logged in the first place. This year, a carbon-credit ratings agency assessed the project, dubbed BigCoast, and found most of the sites included wouldn’t have been harvested because they are on steep slopes or in other areas that are unlikely to be harvested.
Gerrymandering
In its review, Renoster accused BigCoast of gerrymandering – a term used in politics to describe the redrawing of electoral boundaries to ensure a desired result, such as victory for a specific candidate or party. In BigCoast’s case, Renoster alleged that sites included in the project feature small, isolated fragments, including strips along highways and streams. “The project appears as though it may be severely gerrymandered, protecting trees that were otherwise not at any risk.”
- You can read the full report here.
The forest for the trees
Mosaic is under the microscope, but for reasons reverberating across the global carbon-credit market. Projects like BigCoast have come under intense scrutiny as the voluntary market has faced controversy after controversy, with critics saying it’s easy to game.
- An investigation into Verra, the world’s leading carbon standard, found more than 90 per cent of its rain-forest offsets are “phantom credits” that don’t account for any reductions.
- Among the companies whose carbon offsets Verra approved but were ultimately worthless: Disney, Shell and Gucci.
If the carbon-credit industry is able to restore confidence in the voluntary market this year, a Bloomberg report predicts it could grow to US$1.1-trillion by 2050. (My analysis: Canada has lots of trees and could stand to benefit from such a restoration.)
Trees, please
Stueck said reporting this story made her think about how carbon credits might help finance work that researchers say is needed to make forests healthier – innovations like finding better use for waste or burned wood and using drones to help reseed burned areas.
And it underscored the role trees can play in fighting a planetary problem. “They truly are low-hanging fruit in mitigating climate-change impacts and bringing a host of other benefits, including enhanced biodiversity and wildlife habitat,” she wrote. “Trees for the win.”
You can read the full story here.
Daryl Katz: In search of Stanley.JASON FRANSON/The Canadian Press
The business of hockey
How Daryl Katz could become ‘hockey’s Steve Jobs’
First, the Edmonton Oilers have to win Game 6 tonight. But if they’re able to avoid elimination from the Stanley Cup finals for the third straight game, they will have one last chance at becoming the first Canadian team to hoist the trophy since Guy Carbonneau captained the Montreal Canadiens to victory in 1993.
For Daryl Katz, who bought the team 15 years ago, it would mark a happy conclusion in his obsessive chase for the Cup – a period marked by major corporate shifts for his privately owned Katz Group, legal disputes and scrutiny over his “ICE district” development surrounding the team’s Rogers Place Arena.
I asked Globe columnists Cathal Kelly and Kelly Cryderman what a Cup would mean for Katz and the team’s rabid fanbase.
Cathal Kelly: What Katz bought
You buy a sports team for the same reason you buy a Jenny Saville painting – to show your friends that you can. Katz is beyond business considerations.
That said, few owners have been as clever. He bought the Oilers when they were nearing their lowest reputational ebb, losing on the regular and playing in a crummy arena.
Since then, he’s gotten local taxpayers to kick in the majority of funding for a new arena that he operates – every owner’s dream scenario. The team got better because when a club is as bad as the Oilers were when Katz bought them, that’s what they do – they get better.
Shadow Study by Jenny Saville was up for auction last year for an estimated £3-million, which converts to about one year of Ryan Nugent-Hopkins, CDN.John Phillips/Getty Images
In the 15 years Katz has owned it, the franchise value has increased by more than nine times. The Maple Leafs are only up six times over the same period. Forbes now has the Oilers at US$1.85-billion.
The real prize here isn’t money – it’s status. If the Oilers somehow win this thing, Katz will have taken a long-time loser and turned it into a model franchise, featuring the best player in the world. It’s like he bought Apple back when it was floundering and someone just handed him the iPhone. Which makes him hockey’s Steve Jobs.
When he’s long gone, people won’t remember how Katz made his money. But they will remember that he owned the Connor McDavid Oilers. That’s what he bought.
-CK
Kelly Cryderman: The fanbase behind the business
The Great One next door.Bill Grimshaw/The Canadian Press
Depending on who you ask, Katz is either the man who kept the Oilers in Edmonton or held the team ransom in return for an expensive new arena. Perhaps both can be true. But there is no denying the impact a win would have on the city and its fandom – many of whom see Katz as one of them.
Globe reporter and columnist Kelly Cryderman remembers growing up in the blue-collar Edmonton neighbourhood of Tipaskan – where Wayne Gretzky frequently visited the house next door through the dynastic years of the franchise.
In the early 1980s, the Great One was dating her neighbour’s sister, Edmonton singer Vikki Moss.
The neighbour, Jim Moss, was wild about hockey and often invited 99 to his house – where he would host loud parties in his honour. (Much to the chagrin of Cryderman’s father, who was indifferent to all professional sports and preferred “old-timey folk music and jazz” to the REO Speedwagon blaring next door.)
“I was 5, skipping rope on my front sidewalk, when Gretzky pulled up in his sports car,” Cryderman recalls of one day in ‘84. “He said, ‘Hey, I’ve got a new cereal.’ He handed me an autographed box of Pro Stars. I went into the house and gave it to my dad, who said: “Great. Free cereal.” As far as I know we ate it and threw out the box.”
That same year, their brother – the legendary Joey Moss – began a nearly four-decade career as a locker room attendant for the Oilers. Joey was beloved throughout the Oilers organization and fans considered him as much a part of the team as star players from Gretzky to Connor McDavid.
Cryderman is among a base of lifelong faithfuls who have been influenced by the “glory days” of the early eighties, when the Oilers were winning cup after cup. Perhaps more than any other franchise, Cryderman says, the extremely loyal and active fan base that supported the team through both that heady period and its days in the wilderness is still the driving force of its ticket sales.
What we’re watching
Technology stocks: Which direction today? Yesterday it was all of them.
Movies: Don’t Look Now; Klute.
Markets this morning
Global stocks traded cautiously as investors waited for U.S. business surveys for clues about the economy’s resilience to try to determine when the Federal Reserve might start cutting interest rates this year. North American stock futures pointed lower.
Overseas, the pan-European STOXX 600 was down 0.89 per cent in morning trading. Britain’s FTSE 100 gave back 0.77 per cent, Germany’s DAX slid 0.72 per cent and France’s CAC 40 retreated 0.78 per cent.
In Asia, Japan’s Nikkei closed 0.09 per cent lower at 38,596.47, while Hong Kong’s Hang Seng dropped 1.67 per cent to 18,028.52.
The Canadian dollar traded at 73.04 U.S. cents.