Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Welcome to this “rough guide” blog series on the climate emergency and climate emergency campaigning. This series looks at some of the questions frequently asked about the topic: what does the science say, what is an emergency, does the climate crisis fit the bill, what can councils do, how can we talk about it, what needs to be done, what about business, can the political system deal with an issue this big? And many more.
By declaring a national emergency concerning the southern border of the US, Trump may have unwittingly given the next Democratic president an additional weapon with which to combat climate change.
It simply makes no sense to allow something you can control – money – to be a limit on your ambition to deal with something that your future existence depends on, like the climate crisis.
So it was with something of a sinking feeling that I decided to read both David Wallace-Well’s ‘The Uninhabitable Earth’ and Bill McKibben’s new book, ‘Falter’, in the same fortnight. But I’m ever so pleased I did – not least because they’re both beautifully written, utterly compelling in their analysis, and, surprisingly, useful antidotes for premature despair!
What a climate emergency would mean for Exeter University, and what a genuinely low-carbon, resilient, localised, embedded, civic, ‘anchor institution’ would look like is a huge conversation, one that will need to cultivate an imaginative culture where anything feels possible, but on the strength of this event, that process has, hopefully, begun.
In a matter of months, the language of climate emergency has exploded into public space in a spectacular way, with national, regional and governments adopting the term.
In five countries — Australia, the USA, Canada, the UK and Switzerland — an impressive 382 local government authorities covering more than 33 million people have recognised or declared a climate emergency. And now polling conducted in Melbourne shows that a sizeable majority in that city support declaring a climate emergency.
