With Polarization Running Wild, Let’s Restart the Climate Conversation from the Ground Up
Support for climate action is slipping as affordability issues seize public attention and populist politicians pounce. When we address them hand in hand, the two problems can help solve each other.
A new narrative is beginning to take hold around climate change and the energy transition, as the push to decarbonize adapts to the tricky reality that the climate emergency is no longer at the top of the public agenda.
With hindsight, which of course is always 20-20, we could have seen it coming, as COVID-19 tore through the economy and all the markers of a massive housing and affordability crisis began to accumulate. Some of us did spot the risk; too many didn’t. Now we’re here, and it’s crystal clear that the same old facts, arguments, and strategies aren’t going to be enough.
Not if we want to sustain and accelerate the gains we’ve made on climate change and clean energy—incomplete but still undeniable as they’ve been—over the last several years.
In the period leading up to the pandemic, it was easy enough to assume that climate concern and climate solutions were finally and permanently breaking through from the margins to the mainstream.
But that was before the pandemic hit, inflation ran wild, communities fragmented, two brutal wars began, and rampant conspiracy theories and mis- and disinformation blew apart the social cohesion we never realized we were counting on (not that everybody always had access to it).
A thoughtful analysis in this morning’s New York Times traces the dollars behind many of those disinformation campaigns back to oil and gas companies that can no longer win on price against cheaper renewables and energy storage, so they’ve set out to rig public opinion. As we’ve seen through decades of climate denial, millions of fossil-fuelled dollars can buy you a lot of rigging.
All of which has produced a tough reality. Large public majorities still understand the climate emergency, and one-off questions on climate solutions poll well, but people have moved on. With too many households hurting too badly, pocketbook issues reign supreme, even as climate disasters make the economic crunch worse. Now, hardening public attitudes and priorities look very likely to shift the political environment, placing sharp limits on the climate solutions we can imagine and bring to life at just the moment when we need to get more done faster.
From Polarization to Trust
This gap has been building for a while, and there’s no single solution. But here’s a ray of hope.
When people get a chance to meet informally, confront the climate emergency and the affordable crisis in the same conversation, and compare notes on how the two issues intersect to harm their communities and their lives, mutual trust grows and polarization… depolarizes. Often, those conversations produce some very smart thinking on what a local response to climate change, affordability, and a list of other intersecting issues would look like.
Over the last couple of weeks, The Weekender has mentioned the Green Resilience Project, a series of community listening sessions that Energy Mix Productions is convening alongside the Basic Income Canada Network. The 33 conversations we brought together in the first phase of the project, and the more than 900 people who took part, looked at the connections between income insecurity and precarity, local resilience, and climate solutions.
Remarkably, or not, we found far more common ground when we kept the focus broad and the questions more open-ended, in contrast to the firmly-drawn lines we’ve seen around climate policy and solutions. Sometimes, participants were just beginning to define the problem, to articulate how two ostensibly separate issues overlap in real life. Often, they talked about practical steps they were already taking to “multi-solve” a wider list of problems in tandem.
Here’s how the original (fabulously dedicated) GRP team summarized what we heard:
People in Canada, especially those experiencing income insecurity or other forms of financial precarity, are increasingly exposed to climate impacts but are often unable to participate in proportionate climate solutions due to systemic barriers.
People want their communities to be resilient in the face of climate change and income insecurity. They are interested in solutions that make tangible improvements to their lives, including accessible and affordable locally grown food, energy efficient housing and public transportation as well as strengthened local economies, services, and infrastructure.
People are skeptical of their ability to take meaningful action on climate change and income insecurity because of their limited influence on structural and systemic issues when compared to governments and corporations. Many feel that individual actions are limited in their effectiveness and that governments are not taking sufficient action to address these problems.
Communities are ready to take action but lack political and economic agency to effect the scale of change that is needed. Governments must respond to this challenge with transformative policies that address the root causes of climate change and income insecurity while empowering communities to take self-directed action.
After many of those local discussions, we heard people say they needed more—that 2½ hours of good conversation wasn’t the end, just the end of the beginning. Under the right conditions, where their own ideas and day-to-day worries were front and centre, they weren’t stepping back. They were stepping up.
Two Solitudes
When you contrast the tough but constructive local discussions we’ve been hearing through Green Resilience with the resistance to climate narratives elsewhere, the root of the disconnect begins to reveal itself.
Divisions happen, trust erodes, and any sense of shared interest or purpose is obliterated when we have two solitudes carrying on two different, superficially unrelated conversations, one on climate and the other on a brutal and devastating economy where only the very few can feel safe and secure. Both storylines are grounded in reality, each of them is all-consuming enough to leave no space for the other—and when people outside the “bubble” of climate concern are forced to choose, climate doesn’t fare well.
Often, though, when we bring the two conversations together, a light goes on. Green Resilience participants are still just talking, not doing, while they’re in our sessions. There’s scant funding available to translate their new ideas into action, discover what works, then share what they learn and scale it up.
But they’re talking. It’s just a first step, but it sure beats the alternative.
Because, when you listen closely enough for any glimmer of common ground, you can find it in the most astonishing places.
When the ghastly convoy occupation took over downtown Ottawa in February, 2022, it gradually became clear that there were three different occupations going on. We watched in horror as the wannabe Nazis carried their swastika, confederate, and three percenter flags along the Rideau Canal. We heard about the instigators, camped out at a baseball stadium east of downtown, whose online manifesto called for a full-fledged coup d’état until they realized how embarrassing it was and took it down.
Nope. No common ground there. Not now, not ever.
But a more complicated picture emerged from many, though not all, of the grassroot participants who’d followed along, who brought their children to town and camped out near Parliament Hill. From the Ottawa residents who went downtown and tried to engage with those protesters, this composite message emerged:
I’m here because it’s the most important thing I’ve done in my life. I’m doing it for my children, my family, and my community. I’m doing it because I’m out of options—I’ve been working my fingers to the bone for decades and can’t get ahead because the system is rigged against me. And I sure don’t trust politicians to make it right.
Can anyone find a single word in that (conveniently paraphrased) statement that hasn’t applied to front-line work on climate change, energy, or a host of other community issues, at least some of the time?
It wouldn’t have been a good idea to talk about vaccines if we’d been trying to open a conversation with that crowd. It would have been a stretch to open with the deep, pervasive harm the convoy was inflicting on downtown Ottawa residents, as those conversations unfolded against a backdrop of blaring truck horns and spewing diesel fumes.
And yet…convoy organizers managed to tap into something real, an overwhelming sense of rage and despair that was ripe for channeling into a collection of wacky conspiracy theories about vaccines, climate change, 15-minute cities, the federal government, and much more.
Could it be that the price of constantly talking to ourselves inside the “bubble”, of allowing ourselves to be seen as just shouting at anyone outside, left a big chunk of the Canadian population outside the climate conversation and ready to be welcomed elsewhere?
Start at the Beginning
It bears repeating—the disconnect between climate and energy messaging and too much of the wider population took time to build up, and it’ll take time to solve. But we know what to do, and we’re seeing progress on some fronts.
Efficiency Canada has been pushing tirelessly for affordable housing programs that focus on the cost of operating a home, not just renting or buying it, spotlighting the heat pump conversions and other efficiency measures that cut home energy costs while also, by the way, reducing emissions.
The Affordability Action Council framed its work through a climate lens from day one.
The Task Force for Climate and Housing deliberately brought the two issues together to craft a roadmap for addressing both.
The Green Resilience Project is launching a second phase of local conversations where community participants will get to focus on action plans as well as ideas. (Get in touch if you’d like to take part!)
The solutions won’t spring up fully formed overnight, and as we keep saying on this page, it’s all just one arm of the scissors—a wider community conversation about climate solutions won’t replace the harder-edged efforts to curtail the fossil fuel production that is frying the planet.
But it might actually help open up the wider political space where those harder-edged and equally important conversations can reach farther and have more impact.
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.
Chart of the Week
Oil and Gas Lobby Raises Alarm Over ‘Non-Existent Scenario’ for Federal Emissions Cap
Gas Industry Front Group Keeps Pitching LNG after Standards Body’s Greenwash Ruling Waits 3 Months
EV Batteries Outlive the Cars as Degradation Concerns Evaporate
Big Oil’s ‘Grossly Insufficient’ Climate Plans Risk Global Devastation: Report
China CO2 Emissions Fall 3%, Oil Growth ‘Grinds to a Halt’ as COVID Recovery Runs Its Course
Direct Hit from Tornado Rips Down Iowa Wind Turbines
‘Crude Catastrophe’ of Sea Level Rise Threatens Global Oil Trade
Jet Stream Changes Could Double or Triple Dangerous Turbulence
‘Stop Running, Turn and Fight’ on Impact Assessment Law, Hazell Urges Ottawa
Liberal MP calls out PBO for error in carbon price analysis, asks for correction (The Canadian Press)
Canada increases loan guarantees for Trans Mountain pipeline to $19B (Reuters)
What's behind a historic, unusual U.S. military cash transfer to Canadian mines (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation)
University of Calgary looks to relaunch oil engineering program after hiatus (Globe and Mail)
Insurance claims, financial losses take toll on NS wildfire victims (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation)
Indigenous impact fund champions outcomes-based finance (Globe and Mail)
Pakistan temperatures cross 52°C in heatwave (Reuters)
The Maldives faces existential threat from a climate crisis it did little to create (The Guardian)
Hybrid vehicle sales rise, but UK drivers paying double big brands’ stated fuelling costs (Energy & Climate Intelligence Unit)
LEGO Group Ties Bonuses for All Employees to Emissions Reduction Goals (ESG Today)
World's tallest wooden wind turbine starts turning (British Broadcasting Corporation)
Thank you. I am an advocate with Basic Income Ottawa and attended a forum last weekend about a guaranteed living basic income, and the choices people would have if they were lifted above the poverty line. We also learned how family doctors have so much unpaid paperwork to do to help people get onto some form of assistance, yet society would be healthier if poor people’s health was not putting so many demands on the system because they cannot feed themselves or live in healthy accommodations, or have respiratory diseases from forest fire smoke. So yes, costs of global heating are making life unaffordable.
Canadians are polarized due to misinformation, lies and leaders who just do not care. Fortunately the world is on an irrevocable path of changes and we 40 million in Canada cannot stop it even though we are in the top 10 in the world of per capita emitters. While oil companies spend tens of million on misinformation and greenwashing, some just say it's part of a cycle, except the real science indicates it isn't.
If one reads or follows the news, how do you ignore, drought, floods, rising oceans, changes in migration, plants dying off or moving north to cooker climes, and insects moving up or into ares spreading diseases we have never been exposed to. Never mind vaccinated for. So as usual, it's a race for the bottom for Canadians.. then there is rising inequality due to the free market that was supposed to satisfy our every need. Hah! Poilievre like Smith Moe and Ford will lead back into the dark ages of polarizing politics where nothing matters except to reduce government. Well 40 years into reducing government, privatization and free markets, i just don't see how we have benefited our youth and younger families