These days, as the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan decides where to invest its billions, every move it makes is green-tested by future investors — environmental crusaders like Aliya Hirji.

At 16, Hirji, is younger than most organizers in her youth-led climate change advocacy group, Fridays for Future Toronto. She studies the financial markets and their intersection with climate change.

Giant solar farms have been widely heralded as great news for green energy in Canada. But is solar energy really sustainable? In the clamour to promote solar panels, there has been a conspicuous silence about the environmental costs of production and what happens to all those panels at end of life.

The Ontario government announced plans to develop a hydrogen economy Thursday, touting the fuel as a way to kick-start the province’s economic recovery from COVID-19 while lowering emissions.

Alberta is at a climate crossroads, and a group of Edmonton-area mayors believe they have hit upon a solution.

The province's Industrial Heartland Hydrogen Task Force, led by the mayors of Edmonton, Fort Saskatchewan, and Sturgeon, Strathcona and Lamont counties, is advocating for a hydrogen economy to be based in their region.

Global developments suggest a Canadian migration to a green economy is critical to competitiveness. However, if one tries to find Canadian clean tech manufacturing/innovation companies listed on a stock market, one will likely come up with nearly zero, while the number of Canadian-based oil and gas firms offering stocks is seemingly infinite.

Canada has got its priorities wrong.

To talk to Bertrand Masselot, president and CEO of Air Liquide Canada, is to enter a passionate discussion about hydrogen, the most abundant molecule on the planet.

“Hydrogen is not new,” he says in a thick, Parisian-sounding accent. “There’s a growing need for this molecule.”

Masselot’s company is a Quebec-based subsidiary of Air Liquide, which describes itself as a world leader in gas, technologies and services for the industry and health sectors.

Anne Kari Hansen Ovind’s explanation of Norway’s successful and much-publicized conversion to zero-emission vehicles is succinct: “Incentives work.”

All new cars will be zero-emission vehicles by 2025, Norway’s ambassador to Canada predicted during an interview with Canada's National Observer.

“I am an economist. So, I like to talk about economic incentives.”

Norway, which has been described as the “poster child of the EV revolution,” has many incentives to make it more attractive to buy zero-emission vehicles, mostly those powered by electricity.

Mike Kelland takes chances and his latest venture may be his riskiest one to date.

“This is my 10th company,” says the Ottawa-based software entrepreneur. “And some of them actually worked.”

Kelland is the CEO of an early-stage startup called Planetary Hydrogen. He’d like this endeavour to be his last — and greatest success.

His company produces hydrogen, a clean and powerful source of energy.

When COVID-19 struck Canada, Morgan Solar was working on scaling up.

The Toronto-based solar technology company had planned to get its products out to market this year, run demonstrations and bring in sales in the second half of 2020. Instead, like many businesses, it’s had to lay off some staff and seek federal support as it rides out the pandemic.

“I think we’re going to be able to qualify,” said Morgan Solar CEO Mike Andrade.

But Andrade is hoping the company can do more than just survive COVID-19. Morgan Solar and other clean technology leaders are pushing for the federal government to support the ‘cleantech’ sector for a green-driven recovery.

As governments across the country start to allow people to emerge from lockdown, their focus will start shifting from containing COVID-19 to repairing the damage it’s done. One area where they should be looking very hard is energy efficiency.

An investment in energy efficiency will deliver robust environmental and economic returns, ones that will stimulate job creation in the trades and manufacturing sector while simultaneously reducing greenhouse gas emissions and helping make homeowners and businesses more resilient.

After the Great Recession struck in 2008, then-U.S. president Barack Obama threw US$112 billion into green-energy-focused economic-recovery measures.

The investment boosted renewable energies, created jobs for laid-off workers and cut pollution levels.

When Kathleen Wynne’s Liberals went down to defeat at the hands of Doug Ford and the Progressive Conservatives, Ontario electricity had a lot to do with it. That was in 2018. Now, two years later, Ford’s government has electricity issues of its own.

Electricity is politically fraught in Ontario. It’s among the most expensive in Canada. And it has been mismanaged at least as far back as nuclear energy cost overruns starting in the 1980s.