Red Card on Dirty industries
The undisputed highlight of the past month was the World Cup, where Vancouver was one of the fortunate host cities. The overwhelmingly positive vibes and global enthusiasm created new soccer fans across our team and our city. The national pride coupled with the international community was inspiring and fun. Pulling off that much logistical complexity on trust and shared rules deserves real admiration. We tend to reserve that kind of coordinated ambition for sport and spectacle. It's worth asking why we don't expect the same when the stakes are a stable ecosystem.
Vancouver has run this experiment twice before. Expo 86 turns 40 this year. It was a bet nobody was sure would pay off, and it went on to reshape the city's global image and its waterfront. The 2010 Olympics did the same a generation later, and this World Cup is the third installment. The pattern rhymes: the city takes on real upfront cost, and the return shows up over the following decade in tourism, inbound investment and the sheer number of people who visited once and quietly decided to build a life here. The province is already forecasting a million additional out-of-province visitors and over $1 billion in visitor spending across the next five years.
That's the same logic that should apply to climate infrastructure. You either pay to build clean once, or you build dirty and pay twice, once to industrialize and again to undo the damage. Delhi is living the second path, having just legislated new petrol two-wheelers off the road by April 2028 with EV incentives bolted on after decades of some of the worst air on earth. Beijing did something similar, pouring capital into solar and EVs only after its smog became internationally infamous. Vancouver picked the first path decades ago, deliberately, and it looks cheaper in hindsight every year that passes.
The founders worth backing right now are the ones building the "start clean" option for industries and geographies still deciding which path they're on, before the retrofit bill comes due.
