Last month, I published my opinion piece “Understanding the “Municipal” Green
Agenda: The Example of Ad Bans.” The subject matter was the City of Ottawa’s March
2024 decision to pursue the outright banning of advertisements by the oil and gas
industry in the City of Ottawa facilities, such as bus shelters and hockey arenas.
The proposed advertising ban is the, ahem, dramatic “first big step” after Ottawa’s 2019
climate emergency declaration. It seems that the City of Ottawa had its hands full with
the Covid-19 emergency of 2020-23, interrupted by the Trucker Convoy emergency of
the early winter of 2022. Now, a full five years after declaring a climate crisis and a
climate emergency, Ottawa is racing toward… an advertising ban.
Maybe the climate crisis is not such an emergency after all?
How can we make sense of this? When did “climate change” become “climate crisis”
and then “climate emergency”?
Donald Trump’s Twitter history can help us shed some light on this. Trump did not
mince words in his pre-presidential career, frequently trolling the green left and their
somewhat elastic and sloppy use of terminology. Trump took delight in mocking the
green left’s multi-decade inconsistency in their doom-saying over global “cooling” (aka
the coming ice age) and then the global “warming” scare, after which they seemed to
settle on the more neutral, and far less scary “climate change.”
They changed the name from “global warming” to “climate change” after the term global warming just wasn’t working (it was too cold)!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 25, 2013
Trump’s Twitter-mocking of the green left on terminology was quite entertaining but it
also pointed to a deeper truth: the struggle within the green left over their strategy and
tactics, and even their more fundamental goals.
In the years before and after Trump’s famous 2013 musing about the left’s apparent
shift from “global warming” to “climate change” there was, within the green left itself, a
raging debate about the goals of their movement. Some of them were impatient and
wanted immediate action which meant pushing a “global cooling” or “global warming” –
or an even more alarmist – narrative. Others favoured a go-slow approach, determined
to steadily inculcate the broad middle of public opinion that there was indeed some sort
of climate problem, while simultaneously avoiding any sense of alarm: in other words, a
less alarmist terminology such as “climate change.”
Trump, it seems, was only half right. While it was true that the terminology was changed
for strategic purposes, it turns out that it still wasn’t working for either faction of the
green left.
Only the moderates and non-alarmists found the “climate change” position appealing.
Softly and gently, they could plod along. But the other faction pined for more radical
action and immediate activism. “Climate change” wouldn’t do and even “global
warming” became too tame for them. It was time for a crisis – a climate crisis! Enter…
climate emergency declarations! A new approach for the green extremists.
Even among the go-fast-hardliner-alarmist crowd, there later emerged rival approaches.
Who should declare the climate emergency? Some thought “big” and were set on
persuading national and regional state and provincial governments to make the climate
emergency declarations. Others pursued a more “think globally, act locally” approach
and took a bottom-up approach, focusing primarily on local activism to push local
municipal councils. In my next piece, I’ll tell you about the local angle, how, why and
where municipalities around the world came to believe that climate change had all of a
sudden become a crisis which necessitated emergency municipal declarations.