This is the Year We’ve Been Training For

It’s make or break time for climate action. With elections coming up in more than 50 countries this year and climate on the ballot, will the results speed up carbon cuts or bring new obstacles?

Jan 21, 2024

The next 11½ months may determine how far we can get in the battle of our lifetimes—the urgent effort to get climate change under control.

It’s already shaping up to be a pivotal year. And not only because climate impacts and climate solutions are both reaching decisive tipping points.

You can see the intensity at every turn. From wacky, climate-driven winter weather to cascading investment in renewable energy, energy efficiency, and heat pumps. From relentless, fact-free propaganda spewing out of fossil industry PR shops and the governments they’ve helped bring to power, to determined public support for emission cuts and a transition off fossil fuels. All of it backgrounded by carnage in Ukraine, genocide in Gaza, war and displacement in Africa, and simmering hotspots elsewhere. The needless, untold grief and devastation is triggering its own high levels of carbon pollution, enabled by billions of dollars in military spending that would be so much better invested in climate resilience and emission reductions.

And on top of it all, a coincidence of timing that will be either a huge opportunity or a grave threat, depending on how it all turns out: in 2024, an estimated 4.2 billion people will be eligible to vote in more than 50 national elections around the world.

So next year at this time, we could be breathing a sigh of relief as we look back on a series of big wins for climate, human rights, and democracy. But right now, it could go either way, the prognosis isn’t fabulous, and the stakes could scarcely be higher.

The Right Momentum

At the end of 2023, as we closed out a year of record heat and shocking climate disasters, the momentum for change was also beginning to build.

Investment in cleaner, mostly renewable energy was expected to hit $1.7 trillion for the year. Still not enough, but more than ever before, and more money than was pouring into new fossil fuel projects.

Finance and policy wonks were beginning to get the memo from the International Energy Agency (IEA) and others that the fossil industries are entering their decline. That emissions have finally, likely peaked, fossil fuel demand soon will, and anyone who isn’t paying attention can expect to be stuck with trillions of dollars in stranded assets.

Over the short run, none of those emerging shifts have held off record fossil profits—not with Russia’s brutal war in Ukraine driving up demand and prices.

But 2023 was also the year when, for the first time in three decades of negotiations, the consensus statement at the end of the UN’s COP28 climate summit called for a transition out of fossil fuels. The decision document was weaker than 127 countries demanded, with enough caveats built in that petro-states like Russia and Saudi Arabia could sign on. But it still sent a loud, clear signal that change is coming, and the pace is picking up.

Right on cue, many climate hawks are turning their time and attention to the implementation work and financial tools that will be needed to move the off-fossil transition from words on a page to reality on the ground.

As we’ve said so many times on The Weekender—to shifting the focus from what to how.

In a Time magazine post last week, Laurence Tubiana, chair of the European Climate Foundation, and Catherine McKenna, the former Canadian cabinet minister who chairs the UN expert group on net-zero commitments by non-government entities, called for an urgent course correction to keep a 1.5°C climate target within reach. In 2024, that will mean five “exponential actions”, they said: implementing the IEA’s net-zero pathway, launching a managed decline toward a fossil fuel phaseout, delivering trillions in climate finance to the Global South, getting national and sub-national governments onboard, and treating this year of elections as an opportunity to empower people everywhere.

“We need citizens to support and vote for parties that are committed to more ambitious climate policies,” Tubiana and McKenna wrote. “In 2024, we need to redouble our support to people working everywhere for change.”

A ‘Perfect Storm’ of Disinformation

It could all go reasonably well. It could also go horribly wrong.

The Economist and Forbes are both declaring 2024 the biggest election year in history. The New York Times calls it “one of the largest and most consequential democratic exercises in living memory,” with results that “will affect how the world is run for decades to come.”

We’re already seeing the shift in countries like Brazil and Poland, which have adopted strikingly more ambitious climate strategies in the last year, and in New Zealand and the Netherlands, where incoming governments have either taken or signalled major steps backward.

For the year ahead, “climate is front and centre on many of the ballots,” says Times climate writer Manuela Andreoni. “The leaders chosen in this year’s elections will face daunting challenges laid out in global climate commitments for the end of the decade, such as ending deforestation, tripling renewable energy capacity, and sharply reducing greenhouse gas emissions.”

The renewables target actually isn’t as daunting as all that, and rapid emission cuts are far more worrying if we don’t get them done. But we can’t afford the years we’ll lose if key countries step away from their climate commitments.

At this point, the prospects for electoral success appear mixed at best. There are some countries where an upcoming vote “offers the prospect to break gridlocks on climate and energy policies,” Bloomberg News writes. “In others, it may offer an opportunity for a climate-denying backlash. Far too few places show a decent chance of accelerating the transition to clean energy in the way advocated by the COP28 agreement.”

That’s a great argument for building wider buy-in on the benefits of climate action, even as sharper partisan lines get drawn in the run-up to national votes. But this flurry of campaigns won’t be as simple as just making our case and telling the story (not that any national campaign is ever simple). Not with countries facing a “perfect storm” of disinformation, as Darrell M. West, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, warned the Times.

Already, “false narratives and conspiracy theories have evolved into an increasingly global menace,” the paper writes. “Baseless claims of election fraud have battered trust in democracy. Foreign influence campaigns regularly target polarizing domestic challenges. Artificial intelligence has supercharged disinformation efforts and distorted perceptions of reality. All while major social media companies have scaled back their safeguards and downsized election teams.”

And all of those anti-democratic forces routinely align with efforts to deny the reality of climate change, talk down climate solutions, and above all, delay climate action.

So with fossil lobby groups like the Canadian Gas Association and the American Petroleum Institute already pressing hard to tip the debate, climate communicators will have to stand against a torrent of provocation and deliberate confusion that is roiling public spaces worldwide.

Nowhere is that more true, or more consequential, than in the United States, where a proudly confessed sexual predator [trigger warning on this link] facing 91 indictments is on the point of locking up the presidential nomination for one of the country’s two established political parties. If Trump wins, his emerging plan for a second White House term “calls for shredding regulations to curb greenhouse gas pollution from cars, oil and gas wells, and power plants, dismantling almost every clean energy program in the federal government, and boosting the production of fossil fuels,” the Times wrote last year.

Trump “pulled the U.S. out of the Paris climate agreement, staffed his environmental agencies with fossil fuel lobbyists, and claimed—against all scientific evidence—that the Earth’s rising temperatures will ‘start getting cooler’,” Politico adds. “Expect a second Trump presidency to show less restraint.”

We Need to Talk

We know perfectly well by now that Canada isn’t immune to these toxic political shifts. Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre pushes his “Axe the Tax” mantra at every turn, even though most Canadian households and voters get more money back in quarterly carbon tax rebates than they pay out to put a price on pollution. Yet the first government in Canadian history that is on track to meet a national emissions reduction target is also trailing badly in national opinion polls.

An important distinction for climate hawks to make—in 72-point type and flashing lights—is that this isn’t about partisanship for or against any of the parties. It’s a matter of whether the results of the next election will put essential climate policies and program funding at risk, and take money out of Canadians’ pockets into the bargain.

A federal vote isn’t likely until 2025, though British Columbia, Saskatchewan, and New Brunswick are scheduled to hold provincial elections in October.

But this is still the moment we’ve been training for, when years or decades of effort to build public consensus on climate solutions could soar or crash. We need to make time for the slower, more patient and painstaking conversations that will rebuild trust and common ground with fellow citizens whose views and choices don’t place them inside the “bubble” of climate concern. Along the way, it’ll help if we can ratchet down the disinformation and conspiracy theories and bust a few myths.

That begins with listening more and lecturing less (so stand by, would you please, while I lecture at you about that yet again?). But we’ve also seen some great efforts to open up the wider conversations we need. Examples like:

• The approach to deep canvassing introduced by Neighbours United, previously the West Kootenay Eco-Society, that delivered a unanimous vote in favour of a 2050 renewable energy transition in heavily-industrialized Trail, B.C.;

• The excellent work by Canada’s Affordability Action Council to clearly and forcefully position energy efficiency and heat pump retrofits as a path out of energy poverty;

• Will Grant’s Four Levels of Climate Action, a frame that talks about building community networks around practical climate wins;

• An approach to community food security that starts with “propaganda gardens” (I’m not making this up) that gets people engaged with local solutions they can build with their own hands.

The profound disconnects in our communities, and in our politics, didn’t develop overnight, and they won’t be solved quickly or easily. But to get climate change under control, we need our democracy to work, and this is a moment when it needs our help. It isn’t the only thing we have to get done this year, but no climate to-do list is complete without it.

Mitchell Beer traces his background in renewable energy and energy efficiency back to 1977, in climate change to 1997. Now he and the rest of the Energy Mix team scan 1,200 news headlines a week to pull together The Energy Mix, The Energy Mix Weekender, and our weekly feature digests, Cities & Communities and Heat & Power.