This Is a Climate Emergency, but We're Not Screwed Yet

We're not climate doomers, we're climate realists, and the climate solutions we need to meet the moment may already be here.

Every few days another post goes around telling us the world is hard right now but good things are still happening.We get why people share it, but it mostly tells everyone that someone else has this under control and that everyone can get back to business as usual. It's the same story we grew up on, where a hero turns up just before the credits, and climate has been sold to us that way for years, most recently by billionaires who wanted to be Tony Stark.¹ But the harsh reality is - nobody is coming to do this for us, and we think it is more useful right now to be a little scared and motivated than to be soothed.

I despair most of the time, but we can’t afford the luxury of despair.- David Suzuki

Part of the problem is that extreme weather has become background noise, something we watch on the news and scroll past, and we have been desensitized one record-breaking summer and one climate disaster after another. Weather, climate and water disasters have gone up 5 times in 50 years, and the losses went from an average of $49 million a day in the 1970s to $383 million a day in the 2010s. In Canada, insured losses went from $14 billion between 2006 and 2015 to $37 billion between 2016 and 2025, and the Arctic is warming roughly 3 times faster than the global average. When the hunger stones along the Danube start showing up again, carved centuries ago to warn that if the water is this low famine is coming, it gets hard to keep calling any of this a trend.²

None of this is news to the people who have been ringing the alarm for a decade or more, from the Paris Agreement in 2015 to the IPCC’s 2018 warning that we had twelve years, which in Canada lost the news cycle nine days later to cannabis legalization.³ Mainstream climate coverage peaked in 2021 and has been falling ever since, and this September’s UN report saying we will now pass 1.5°C degrees was mostly read as game over (I mean read the cover…. they are saying there are many ways to recover we just need to act - Navigating exceedance of 1.5°C and pathways towards return). The report itself says something more demanding, which is that how far we overshoot, and for how long, still depends on what governments and companies decide to do next, and so far what they have decided goes well beyond inaction, with more money flowing into fossil fuels and climate conferences sponsored by some of the biggest polluters in the world.

David Suzuki clearly points out that when there is a war, economics get set aside, and we have watched that happen twice in recent memory. During COVID governments rewrote the rules to keep people alive and safe, and in the past year Canada decided defence was a priority and the capital showed up almost overnight, including from funds that weren’t even allowed to invest in defence a few years ago.⁴ The argument that there simply aren’t enough climate solutions to fund does not survive that comparison, because solutions show up where the money and the political will go.

We also don’t have to re-invent the model. Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corps put three million young men to work in the 1930s, planted three billion trees, built 711 state parks and sent $25 of every $30 paycheque home to their families, and Canada already has its own versions. Canadian wildland firefighters get deployed from Australia to Greece because of the expertise built through CIFFC, and Indigenous Guardians, running at more than 240 sites, returns up to $3.70 in social, cultural, economic and environmental value for every dollar invested. Canada already has a climate corps, it is Indigenous-led, and most people have never heard of it.

We really deeply need to sit in wonder and whimsy at the natural world and the gifts we've been given, and find the fight in ourselves. - Kristy, Sustainability Consultant Not Giving Up!

We are in a climate emergency, and we are not screwed yet. Every time a flood or a fire makes the news, somebody asks who is going to fix it, and the answer is simple - you and me, and a lot of ordinary people who haven't been hired yet. That work will be done by millions of people finding their role in it rather than by one hero, which is exactly where we go next episode, with climate jobs and the skills it will take to fill them. Next episode we look at those jobs, who is training for them, and what it would take for the rest of us to get one.

All The Receipts on our substack https://doinggoodbadly.substack.com/