Author: Stella Ambler

Yes, I might seem slightly obsessed with the nonsensical “climate emergency
declarations” passed by just about every Canadian municipality, but I have good reason
to be. Our municipal politicians might have thought they were engaging in good old-
fashioned and meaningless sloganeering and virtue signalling when they passed these
a few years ago, just before the Covid pandemic, but those declarations are coming
back to haunt them – and us!

Following the adoption of the alarmist declarations, the next phase in the green left’s
bullying of local councillors was to get them to adopt some version of what amounts to a
“green master plan” – a climate emergency manifesto that outlines broad goals and
even specific targets for future action. The green left activists never stop, and they
didn’t stop on this file: they wanted action.

Let me use the City of Ottawa – the subject of an earlier blogpost – as a case in point.
Ottawa’s climate emergency master plan was pushed through Council in 2020 and it
certainly goes beyond virtue-signalling. Its central component, called Energy Evolution,
includes a goal to transition the city to zero greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by the
year 2050 (also known as “Net Zero by 2050”). In its own words, the plan contains
“ambitious” targets to transition to low carbon energy sources which will “reduce the
effects of climate change, grow our local economy and create jobs, improve public
health, improve social equity, and increase climate resiliency.” Ambitious indeed! This is
certainly more than sloganeering!

By its own admission, the Energy Evolution transition plan will require “concerted
efforts” and the “scope and scale required is unprecedented in both action and
investment.” That could be called a massive understatement. Here are the city’s key
“stretch goals” from the plan:

“All fossil fuels will have to be phased out”!

They lead with the big one here. It doesn’t get much more ambitious than this. Evidently,
councillors didn’t consider the impact on energy reliability and affordability for hundreds
of thousands of homeowners and businesses, particularly during Ottawa’s cold winters.
Currently, natural gas is a primary source of heating. Phasing it out would lead to
increased energy costs and potential shortages, especially during peak demand times –
like winter. A mandated phase-out of natural gas means that residents would face steep
energy bills, power outages, or both—and those least able to afford it would suffer the
most. I will devote an entire column to this topic, but here’s the spoiler: this goal will
never be achieved because it is simply not possible. And the dangerous efforts to head

in that direction will bring about untold suffering for Ottawa’s residents and devasting
effects for the city’s economy.

Next up from the city’s green master plan: “heating and transportation systems will have
to be nearly fully electrified” and “renewable electricity (mostly wind and solar)
generation and electricity storage will be required to meet demand.”

These goals encompass homes, businesses, cars, trucks, public transportation; in other
words, everything. Let’s take a look at how that could play out. Wind and solar currently
make up only about 7% of the country’s installed electricity generation. Installed is a key
word here: it means the facilities are there, but not always working. When they don’t
work, something else must, which means you build a second, back-up, system that is
always available – usually natural gas. So you in fact pay for two systems. Ontario
taxpayers already subsidize 70 per cent of the cost of electricity in the province.
Subsidies to keep wind and solar power superficially affordable for power users cost the
government $3 billion a year. In total, Ontario will spend $7.3 billion this year on various
electricity subsidies. How many more taxpayer dollars will have to be thrown at
electricity in order to increase that 7% wind and solar number or to “fully electrify”
everything? And how long will it be before we are all mandated to relinquish our
gasoline or diesel-powered vehicles? (If we can’t afford a new electric replacement car,
there’s always public transit – how is that going, Ottawa?)

You get the picture: Ottawa’s municipal politicians got bullied by the green left to adopt
insane climate policies. But now the pressure is on to enforce them, and that pressure is
coming from many corners – including the likes of Mark Carney, Gerald Butts, and their
ilk. My next column will explain how that is working out.

The recent Los Angeles wildfires killed at least 29 people, forced over 200,000 evacuations, burned over 57,000 acres of land and destroyed more than 18,000 homes. But, contrary to what the mainstream media and the green left would have you believe, this catastrophe was not all “climate change.” 

And the woke, virtue-signalling green lefties in the City of Los Angeles (and the equally left-wing state government of California) “shoulda seen it comin.’”

The Santa Ana, or “devil winds,” have hurricane-level wind speeds of 80 to 100 miles per hour, are highly predictable and seasonally common in the region, and have caused massive wildfires since records have been kept. The southern California coastal region sees, on average, ten of these windstorms every year.

But L.A., one of the first U.S. cities to declare a climate emergency (in April 2018), is run by woke leftists: award-winning actors at virtue-signalling. They are, predictably, also sufficiently corrupt, lazy, or incompetent enough to ignore the consequences of their own rhetoric.  

For if there truly was a climate emergency – one that justified all their hot air and bombast for the past many years – then shouldn’t the City of Los Angeles have done more to prepare for the recurring natural disasters, climate change-induced or not?

Notwithstanding the best efforts of the media to paint a climate change narrative, some commentators were quick to reveal L.A.’s spectacular failures to prepare for the wildfires.  Consider the many reports of empty water reservoirs. Once the nearby 3 million-gallon tanks were tapped, the water pressure needed to send the water uphill to the fire hydrants in the higher-elevation neighbourhoods (like Palisades, which was decimated by the fires) was insufficient. The 117 million gallon supply of water in tanks further away had been allowed to dwindle over time, lowering overall system pressure and resulting in multiple instances of fire fighters finding their hydrants had run dry.

Multiple fire hydrants drawing water from the system for several hours was not sustainable as the system was “not designed to fight wildfires,” said L.A. County Power and Water Director Mark Pestrella. 

With the Santa Ana winds as regular occurrences, why not?

Then we had the drama between woke mayor of Los Angeles Karen Bass and woke Los Angeles Fire Chief Kristin Crowley. Midway through the wildfires, and after weeks of climate change headlines, Chief Crowley exposed what the Mayor was trying to conceal: that L.A.’s budget cuts had “adversely affected the Department’s ability to maintain core operations.” 

It turns out, according to Chief Crowley, that L.A. city council, doubtless still on high alert after their climate emergency declaration of seven years earlier, cut the emergency services budget so deeply that they “severely limited the Department’s capacity to prepare for, train for, and respond to large-scale emergencies” and, further, affected its capacity for brush clearance inspections and residential inspections. 

L.A. city council cut the L.A. Fire Department’s budget by 2%, about $17 million dollars in 2024 alone.  In fact, the LAFD has only half the number of firefighters per capita compared to other major U.S. cities: less than 1 instead of close to 2 per 1,000 residents. The city has fewer firefighters in total today than it had in 2010. 

I wonder why they made these cuts without first declaring an end to the climate emergency? Hmmm.

A very defensive Mayor Bass pushed back, at first by clinging to the climate change narrative, and then by adding “[t]here were no [budget] reductions that were made that would have impacted the situation that we’re dealing with.” 

After more words between L.A.’s wokesters, Mayor Bass finally, in late February, silenced her fire chief by, well, firing her. “We know that 1,000 firefighters that could have been on duty on the morning the fires broke out were instead sent home on Chief Crowley’s watch.” 

Ouch. On display in this she said/she said exchange, you can see that the left has been forced off of the man-made climate change narrative and has moved on to a man-made (or, in this case, woman-made) colossal bad judgement and incompetence storyline.

The climate change narrative in the media covering L.A. brought back memories of last year’s catastrophic fires in Jasper, Alberta, as well as the western fires in 2023 and the 2016 behemoth in Fort McMurray.

Many of the reports about the Alberta wildfires predictably pinned the cause as climate change, in the same way that the U.S. media initially portrayed the L.A. situation. But stories are now coming out about poor planning and insufficient funding around natural disaster emergencies. Last year, Jasper Mayor Richard Ireland admitted to “the compelling need to invest together in training, preparation, mitigation and adaptation, ensuring that we not only respond effectively but that we also build a more resilient future.”

In other words, climate crisis declarations or not, it makes more sense for cities to focus on core needs – like planning for real natural disasters and protecting the budgets of emergency services – rather than hollow declarations about potential crises, and irresponsible attacks on oil and natural gas and the countless beneficial goods and services we derive from them.  

In my last column, I wrote about Donald Trump’s 2013 tweet, in which he implied that the term “global warming” wasn’t working for the green left, and that lead to the new lingo:  “climate change.” I noted that the term “global warming” was too alarmist for the moderate greens, which led to the adoption of “climate change” terminology. But neither “global warming” nor “climate change” was working for the radical green left, who needed a clarion call to action for their global movement. Thus, we saw the radical greens looking for something a little more spicy.

Since then, I had the chance to meet former Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott (PM from 2013-2015). He shared my view about how the terminology has evolved, which is interesting considering that it was in Abbott’s Australia where “climate emergency” declarations originated. Abbott is a supporter of the oil and gas industry in his country, and still an influential conservative voice in the world. He accepted the term “climate change” and was, himself, not a climate change “denier,” as it was obvious to Abbott that climate change is a fact, especially considered over the very long term. 

 But Abbott’s use of the term comes with one very big proviso: even granting that some version of “man-made” climate change may be occurring, he was steadfastly opposed to the climate alarmism of the radical green movement. Abbott especially rejected – and continues to reject – the political agenda that follows the false, cartoonish and apocalyptic conclusions that follow from the fact of climate change. Government climate change policy, according to Abbott, should never include policies that make life less affordable for consumers. In addition, governments must embrace and safeguard the benefits that oil and gas production brings to their respective countries. 

It is conceivable that Abbott and other conservative politicians of the last decade who accepted climate change terminology, but rejected the green political agenda that usually accompanied it, in fact contributed to the green left’s rejection of this moderate terminology. How so? Well, if even the so-called right-wing can comfortably use the term climate change, then the term can hardly act as an effective motivator for the green left’s propaganda purposes. Something more alarmist would be needed for their communications.  

How about a climate “crisis” or “emergency”? 

The first declaration of a “climate emergency” was in the Australian municipality of Darebin, a suburb of Melbourne, on December 5, 2016. It was a victory for the local radical green left over the more moderate, go-slow approach of the Australian green NGOs and their ilk. Next came another Melbourne area council – Yarra – on February 17, 2017, then Vincent on April 4, 2018. The climate emergency declaration strategy was also spreading to the USA, first to Hoboken, New Jersey on November 1, 2017, followed by Montgomery, Alabama on December 5, 2017, Berkeley, California on June 12, 2018, and then Los Angeles on May 1, 2018. Bristol, UK, joined the party on November 13, 2018.  

Climate emergencies were also declared throughout the Province of Quebec in 2018, with climate change emergency debates spreading to council chambers across most cities and towns in English Canada in 2019. The result: a veritable tsunami of climate emergency declarations! 

Did mainstream Canadian political opinion suddenly lurch dramatically leftward in 2019, so far left that middle-class awareness of climate change led, overnight, to a “climate crisis”? Did the milquetoast municipal political class of hundreds of Canadian municipalities suddenly find radical left green religion? Uh, no.   

The green left activists who impressively orchestrated dozens, and then hundreds, of climate emergency declarations across Canada in 2019 soon discovered that the same band-wagonism that prompted lemming-like municipal politicians in this country to declare “climate emergencies” quickly reduced these declarations to a pathetic status of empty virtue-signalling symbolism. 

Following the hundreds of 2018 and 2019 municipal climate emergency declarations, there was virtually no follow-up action – anywhere – by these municipal councils. Why not? No doubt municipal leaders were distracted for quite a while by the Covid-19 outbreak and, after that, a multitude of other pressing issues. But quite a lot of time passed, and still nothing happened. No new policies, no sense of urgency. And so the climate emergency deception became apparent to those paying attention. 

Perhaps it wasn’t a true emergency after all.  

From 2016 to 2019, climate emergency declarations started out as a radical far-left green strategy, then became a very mainstream concept. And when nothing was done about them, these same declarations revealed the climate “crisis” to be merely the old wines of “global warming” and “climate change” in a new bottle. 

In short, there was no climate emergency back in 2019. And there isn’t one today. Sure, as Tony Abbott readily conceded, there is indeed climate change, and always has been. But a climate emergency? Nope. 

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.

The City of Ottawa voted in March of this year to consider banning fossil fuel (oil, natural gas) advertisements in city facilities. Why would they do this, I wondered.  

Banning advertisements from gas companies? What are Ottawa city councillors concerned about?  

Are they troubled about arguments that might break out in bus shelters over the ads? No, I suspect most citizens are more concerned about getting to work on time.  

So, who does care enough about these ads to show up at a city environment and climate change committee meeting to speak out against them?  

I watched a recording of the public committee meeting online and discovered that the outrage is coming from green activists. Not the hundreds of thousands of Ottawa taxpayers, but a handful of green activists. Their agenda, as always, is to stop the use of hydrocarbons (gasoline for your car, natural gas for your home, propane for your barbecue, any hydrocarbon to generate electricity, etc.). Achieving the green agenda, at the municipal level at least, starts with a ban on oil and natural gas advertising. 

Clearly, Ottawa city councillors are listening and taking the issue seriously, and the green “narrative” very seriously. In response to the demands of the green activists, Ottawa city council declared a “climate emergency” in 2019 and, in 2020, unanimously adopted a 35-page “Climate Change Master Plan” which contained within it an 86-page implementation plan called “Energy Evolution.” The former plan, it’s important to note, included the now ubiquitous slogan, “Net Zero by 2050.” 

In the simplest terms, “net zero” – by whatever year – means that GHGs are reduced to an absolute minimum. In case there was any doubt that Ottawa city councillors were fully on board, one only needs to read the Energy Evolution implementation framework which states clearly and succinctly on page 2 that “All fossil fuels will have to be phased out.”  

It’s right there, in black and white. Ottawa city councillors mean business. It’s an emergency! 

So now, five years into the “climate emergency,”   Ottawa’s elected officials have decided to finally “take action” on their commitment to “phase out” oil and gas in Ottawa. Their first steps? Go to the people and shout “no more oil and gas” from the rooftops? Develop a detailed campaign to inform residents about the implications of taking out of common usage the fuels and technologies on which our society depends for virtually everything we do? Hold public meetings to promote the plan and invite feedback?  

None of the above. Seemingly, this is a sort of “non-urgent” emergency. 

It seems they decided to take a different approach, one that would lead to much less debate, controversy or feedback.  

They decided instead to consider a ban on advertisements promoting oil and gas usage as good for the economy.  

Why this micro-action instead of going to the people directly with the details of their ambitious plan to completely phase out fossil fuels? Surely, Ottawa residents should hear all about this. Don’t they deserve a thorough debate about the viability of this ambitious goal and a detailed roll-out of how it will be accomplished?  

Is it feasible?  

Was it ever feasible?  

How will residents be affected? When do the residents get to weigh in? Will they hear both sides?  

How can both sides of this debate be heard when Ottawa city councillors’ commitment to the democratic process is such that their first step is to ban the oil and natural gas industry from defending its existence and the merits of its product?  

Whether or not you believe that banning all fossil fuels is realistic or achievable is worthy of debate, and many (including myself) would argue that we are entering fantasyland here,  that debate won’t even get started if city councillors effectively bar the other side – i.e. anyone who disagrees with them – from making its case.  

But this is the green agenda, and, seemingly, the City of Ottawa’s agenda. It isn’t about having a public debate. It isn’t about weighing the options. It is about snuffing out one side completely. It makes one wonder what Ottawa City Council would do if they had the power to compel social media platforms like, oh, maybe X, formerly Twitter, from allowing pro-oil and gas tweets. Hmmmm! 

Municipalities for too long have gotten away with this kind of conduct. 

At Municipal Watch, we intend to shine a light on this – because it hurts us as taxpayers. It hurts us as Canadians. Instead of attending to the proper business of representing their constituents and prudently managing their cities, these local politicians are chasing green rainbows and hurting Canada. 

In my next piece, I will expose the green activists: their motives, their plan, and how they are persuading municipal councillors like the ones in Ottawa to commit to such far-reaching, ambitious and extreme goals and why the first action item they chose is a ban on advertisements.