To Tackle Climate Change, Which Is More Important: Words or Actions?
We do need climate results, not just targets. But what if the debate over language and targets is impeding the wider common ground we'll need to withstand Trump and 'MAGA Alberta'?
If we’ve heard it once, we’ve heard it a dozen times. Whenever he’s asked about cornerstone federal climate policies like the government’s 2030 emission reduction target or its legislated cap on oil and gas emissions, Prime Minister Mark Carney says he’s focused on actual progress, not aspirational goals.
Most recently on Friday, when the PM declared that “what this government is interested in is results, not objectives.” That was in a media availability where he said the fate of the Trudeau government’s hard-fought, watered-down, long-delayed cap on oil and gas emissions will depend on the ability of the country’s fossil, mining, and manufacturing sectors to lower their emissions and boost their international competitiveness.
One way of framing Carney’s first six months in office is that he is systematically dismantling an overdue web of targets and rules that the Trudeau government patched together between 2015 and late 2024, at overwhelming political cost. The other storyline is that he’s introducing an immediate cap—unlike the highly-touted one that doesn’t take effect until 2030-32—on two decades of performance art, first by former PM Stephen Harper, then by former PM Justin Trudeau. For all their flagrant differences, what the two arguably had in common was their appetite for replacing action with rhetoric and kicking serious, significant emission reductions down the road.
The picture gets more stark in a country where no federal government of any political stripe has ever set a climate target that it actually got organized to meet. That’s largely because no government has ever wanted to take on the fossil fuel industry—by far one of the most powerful and demanding lobby groups in Ottawa, and the only sector whose emissions are still rising.
And now, the stakes are even higher, with the fossil industry’s proxy government in Alberta winking and nodding to a full-blown separatist movement that would lend fifth column support to Donald Trump’s toxic 51st state rhetoric.
Which leaves us with the same question Carney seems to be trying to tackle, for better or for worse: Which ultimately matters more, the message or the outcome? That’s a question the climate community has been grappling with mightily, but it also goes to the heart of how we all keep our #ElbowsUp against the threat of U.S. annexation.
The Great Messaging Debate
The easy answer is that we need both. But too often, climate advocacy gets so tied down in its own intricate messaging that it falls flat outside the small and shrinking “bubble” of people who are already inside the debate. When that happens, the semantics take away from the practical, positive steps we can and must take to reduce emissions, phase out fossil fuels, adapt to the climate impacts we’re already seeing, and work hard to leave no one else behind.
And yet, the messaging debates can be endless—and not only in Canada. The latest round comes mainly from the United States, where a podcast hosted by Latitude Media Executive Editor Stephen Lacey triggered a painfully intense exchange about climate communicators’ failure to break through and what to do about it.
Much of the conversation expressed the continuing agony and recriminations of a country that ceded the storyline on Joe Biden’s signature Inflation Reduction Act, the same way the Trudeau government did on its consumer carbon tax. Just as most Canadians had no idea that most households received more back in rebates than they paid out under the federal carbon pricing system, Americans never got the memo that clean energy investment was starting to drive the economic renewal and job creation they’d been waiting for.
To-MAY-toes, to-MAH-toes, you might say, except for one big, ranting, existential difference: We didn’t elect a predatory sociopath and his predatory enablers, bent on dismantling any pretense of American democracy and bending the rest of the world to their will.
But the inward-looking focus on America’s pain distracted somewhat from another important storyline that climate communicators everywhere are grappling with: What it really means to work outside the community of self-identified climate hawks and “progressives”, and whether the strategies we’ve seen so far are just pushing climate action even farther from the mainstream to the margins.
Here’s Lacey, a 20+-year veteran of climate communications and a leading voice at the former Greentech Media publishing platform before he co-founded Latitude in 2018:
My main critique is of progressive climate groups. I am seeing these groups continue to lean into intersectionality and justice messaging, which clearly does not move public opinion…
Progressive climate groups assume the electorate is full of latent climate activists who simply needed mobilization and moral clarity. In reality, the median voter tends to accept that climate change is real but prioritizes affordability, reliability, and economic stability above sweeping structural change.
Designing messages and policies for highly engaged progressives—for example, bundling climate action with issues like labour justice, housing, or universal health care—does nothing to reach the majority of Americans who are currently worried about the economy, or struggling to pay their bills right now.
And the response from Oslo-based Ketan Joshi, a smart and prolific source of data and analysis on climate change and the energy transition:
Mate, arguing that we should care about the ability for people to pay for their power bills is a justice issue, and environmental and climate justice campaigners have been shouting, fighting, and scrabbling in the dirt for funding on this for decades. By saying we should care about affordability, you are yourself being a woke lefty [social justice warrior] mired in intersectionality and identity politics.
The second piece of bad news I have is this: if you actually want to fight for affordability, your enemy is not climate campaigners or justice campaigners, it’s the right wing groups who are being shockingly effective in force-feeding fossil fuels onto the power grid, worsening bills stress with data centres, and using a massive national media disinformation machine to help stymie development of grid infrastructure and new clean energy.
So here’s a simple question, just in time to get The Weekender uninvited from Thanksgiving dinner on all sides: What if they’re both right?
Start Where We Agree
Let’s start where Lacey and Joshi appear to be in tacit agreement. Climate change and the energy transition are irrevocably linked to grassroot issues like economic and social justice and affordability, and front-line groups across quite a wide political spectrum have been trying to connect those dots in countless practical ways.
The tension, particularly for some national groups and coalitions in both Canada and the U.S., seems to turn on where we start out rather than where we need to end up—and how that difference shapes the response to some of what we’re hearing from Carney.
• What if we consistently centred the common ground we can find with communities that are already bearing the brunt of the climate and economic crises, whose beliefs, behaviours, and political clout will determine how much we can get done on climate change and energy?
• What if we supported our natural allies on issues that do intersect, from climate and energy, to affordability and justice and more, by finding the tools in a climate toolbox that will help them get what they need and want, faster and better?
• What if we joined hands to build practical solutions from the ground up, almost unconditionally working from wherever a community starts out?
• What if we consistently emphasized long-term, durable working relationships based on trust over relatively quick, transactional wins?
And as the contours of Carney’s climate strategy slowly, gradually become clear, how will we embrace any practical steps he puts forward to get faster, deeper emission cuts done, while building momentum and buy-in for tougher targets?
The Stakes Are Getting Higher
The Canadian climate community is running out of time to sort this out as the stakes get ever higher. The deeply hypocritical provincial government that former MP Charlie Angus calls “MAGA Alberta”, supported by its opportunistic sidekick in Saskatchewan, has apparently been coordinating efforts with the U.S. regime while Trump and his deliberately dysfunctional ambassador keep amping up the talk of annexation.
Angus wrote last week:
A group of MAGA separatists met in Washington with “cabinet-level” officials about their plan to break up the country. MAGA Alberta is looking to use Danielle Smith’s promised referendum to unilaterally declare independence, with the expectation of immediate recognition from the Trump administration…
“As the MAGA traitors were meeting in Washington, Premier Smith announced that Alberta would lead the way in pushing a new pipeline through British Columbia,” Angus continued. But her agenda isn’t to get an impossible pipeline across the finish line. “As her separation referendum stalls out, she needs to pick a fight with Canada to rile her base.”
Days later, on his own trip to Washington, Carney offered to revive the Keystone XL pipeline in a bid to pull Trump back into some semblance of serious negotiations on U.S. tariffs.
“This controversial pipeline has been dead for years,” Angus responded. “Reviving it represents a huge increase of Canadian bitumen production all to benefit the United States. It is also a massive carbon bomb whose emissions will impact the planet for decades.”
All of these machinations set a bigger, even more urgent agenda for climate communications—and climate listening. The end goal is still to confront the crisis of our lifetimes. But if Canadian climate hawks can’t break through and find common ground where we’ve only rarely sought it out until now, we won’t just extend the paralysis behind our country’s tepid emission reduction efforts.
With our issues at the forefront of the effort to sell out and break up the country, we have to recognize how little we’ll be able to get done—in our work, and in our everyday lives—if MAGA Alberta succeeds.
The good news is that Danielle Smith’s political base is nowhere near the majority, not in Canada and not in Alberta. And with the tough conversations that are inevitably ahead, there is so much common ground to be found, in regions and communities of interest where hard core climate hawks might least expect it.
But in this moment, we’ve no time to waste, and little or no margin for error.
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.
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A comment from one of our avid readers!...
In the midst of a crisis of affordability and job losses it makes no sense to listen to the lies and misdirections of a filthy rich fossil fuel industry.
The same truths hold in Canada as in Texas and California, and from Maine to the Deep South. Energy from renewables has proven more reliable, cheaper, and provided more jobs than have fossil fuels.
Only the financial interests of the oil and gas bigwigs with their lobbying power and positions in government policy determination have gravely distorted free market forces and prevented from replacing them from a faster move to solar, wind, battery and geothermal combinations and the demise of fossil fuels fuels.
It is past time ordinary citizens demanded common sense policies from our governments and the withdrawal of supports for LNG and oil in favour of letting us obtain cheaper battery aided continuity renewable energy while accessing the greater number of and healthier jobs they provide. It is past time those able invested in entities providing renewable energy sources, and those with concern for their future health and economic welfare sought jobs in or took initiatives to support renewable energy projects.