The Ontario Securities Commission has issued Notice 51-717 Corporate Governance and Environmental Disclosure, which outlines OSC plans to enhance compliance by reporting issuers (other than investment funds) with corporate governance and environmental disclosure requirements. The Notice is part of the OSC’s corporate sustainability reporting initiative.

The OSC is also giving itself a year to develop guidance for issuers, after consulting stakeholders, on compliance with environmental disclosure requirements set out in National Instrument 51-102. The aim is to publish guidelines by December 2010, so that reporting issuers have enough time to consider it in preparing their 2010 disclosure documents.

We have just pushed out a small feature. When you search for an item in Nimonik, you can now filter the results by Legislation, Topic, or Updates. This makes it easier to find what you are looking for fast.

We are working on search in registers, expect it soon.

Neat little video about deforestation.

Maya Lin – Unchopping a Tree from What is Missing? Foundation on Vimeo.

To follow-up on our last post, Copenhagen was a disaster. There are many possible motives, but one observer claims China blatantly sabotaged the talks. See this Guardian article, but here is the crux of his statement:

The truth is this: China wrecked the talks, intentionally humiliated Barack Obama, and insisted on an awful “deal” so western leaders would walk away carrying the blame. How do I know this? Because I was in the room and saw it happen.

China’s strategy was simple: block the open negotiations for two weeks, and then ensure that the closed-door deal made it look as if the west had failed the world’s poor once again.

I also recently saw the movie “Collapse” which paints a scary portrait of the upcoming peak oil. Solutions? Nuclear is getting hot and it may be possible to use a different fissile material. Thorium, a radioactive substance, creates far less waste, is easy to refine and has no risk of meltdown. If true, this technology would change everything we think we know about energy. Do read this Wired magazine article if you would like to know more. Oh, but the way, China is leading the nuclear front, coincidence?

Both environmentalists and climate change skeptics should read this opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal by Nigel Lawson, who for years was Chancellor of the Exchequer in Margaret Thatcher’s Government.

Lawson is long-time critic of the Kyoto Protocol and, for a while at least, sided firmly with global warming skeptics. He’s nuanced his arguments in the last few years recognizing now that global warming is a reality that will have a negative, albeit moderate, impact on us. But he has little time for alarmist and apocalyptic statements from climatologists and climate change policy advocates.

Lawson proposes we “abandon the Kyoto-style folly that reached its apotheosis in Copenhagen last week, and move to plan B,” which essentially boils down to adaptation, plus modest increases in government investment in technological research and development.

This hardly amounts to much of a solution, however Lawson’s analysis of why Copenhagen failed is spot on:

1. The massive cost of decarbonizing the world’s economies because carbon-based energy is likely to remain the cheapest form of energy for the foreseeable future

2. Solving climate change is about negotiating a solution on how to share the burden between the developed world, responsible for the bulk of past emissions, and the developing world, which will likely be responsible for a sizeable chunk of future emissions.

His most insightful comment on the dilemma facing the developing world is this:

And the overriding priority for the developing world has to be the fastest feasible rate of economic development, which means, inter alia, using the cheapest available source of energy: carbon energy.

Moreover, the argument that they should make this economic and human sacrifice to benefit future generations 100 years and more hence is all the less compelling, given that these future generations will, despite any problems caused by warming, be many times better off than the people of the developing world are today.

For an interesting debate pitting Nigel Lawson and author Bjorn Lomborg on one side against Green Party leader Elizabeth May, and George Monbiot, on the other, check out the Munk Debates site.